Arthur Goes Fourth VII: Prunella Enchanted
by Dead Composer
Summary: Prunella's new friend is a real witch.
1. Angus Winslow Comes to Town

This story is rated PG due to frightening situations and a brief scene of non-graphic nudity.  
  
This is the seventh installment in the seemingly endless Arthur Goes Fourth series, which chronicles the adventures of Arthur and his friends in fourth grade.  
  
Disclaimer: Marc Brown (bleep) owns the (bleep) Arthur characters, capiche?  
  
----  
  
To begin, a summary of the important characters (original and canon) and their situations at the end of AGF VI.  
  
- Popular and comical teacher Bud Wald (a horse man with a goatee) teaches Arthur's fourth-grade class. His students include (the boys) Arthur, Binky, George, Van, and Adil, and (the girls) Francine, Muffy, Fern, Beat, and Mavis.  
  
- Unicorn-obsessed drama coach Ralph Baker (a hippo man) teaches a fifth-grade class whose number includes Prunella, Marina, and Alan (Brain), who advanced to fifth grade by passing an AP test.  
  
- Buster moved away from Elwood City during AGF II after his mother Bitzi married Harry Mills (I wrote that before the "Bitzi's Breakup" episode). Sue Ellen and her parents suddenly moved away during AGF VI under the pretense of an emergency mission to war-torn Karjakistan, although it likely had more to do with the little-known fact that Mr. Armstrong is secretly a CIA spy.  
  
- Nothing much has happened to Arthur, D.W., and their family, other than Adil Faruk, Arthur's Turkish pen pal, staying at their house while he spends time as an exchange student in Mr. Wald's fourth-grade class.  
  
- Jean Stiles, a polar-bear woman who was Arthur's first fourth-grade teacher before she went into rehab for a prescription-drug addiction, has taken over the role of Mary Moo Cow for the new children's show, "New Moo Revue". Fern and Binky have assumed the role of Mini-Moo, with Fern providing the voice and Binky wearing the costume.  
  
- In AGF V&VI, several of the characters experienced the mind-altering effects of billionaire inventor Andrew Putnam's Opticron device, which was intended to reprogram the human brain like a computer. Francine ended up with a copy of Sue Ellen's personality and memories in her head, which boosted her geography grades and caused her to develop romantic feelings towards Arthur. Putnam used his device to transfer his own knowledge and experience into the minds of Beat Simon and Mavis Cutler before he died. The girls eventually reversed the process, however, suffering memory gaps as a result (three weeks for Beat and an entire year for Mavis). It would appear that Putnam is truly dead and gone...unless someone else is still serving as a host for his consciousness...  
  
- Mavis Cutler first appeared in AGF II as Muffy's classmate at Uppity Downs Academy, a private school which she attended until the events of AGF VI. Mavis' prodigious intelligence was partly explained by the merger of her own knowledge and personality with that of Andrew Putnam. It remains to be seen how she will perform academically now that Putnam is gone from her mind, along with her memory of the previous year. Mavis is a hamster girl with curly red hair and glasses. Her father is a bank manager, and her mother is a doctor.  
  
----  
  
Chapter 1  
  
It was a typical, though unseasonably warm, late-February day in Elwood City. Dressed in his green sweater with a prominently displayed nametag, Ed Crosswire casually sipped from a complimentary cup of hot cocoa. There hadn't been much customer demand for the stuff due to the warm weather, so he had decided to help himself to a bit. It was five-thirty, and the auto lot at Fifth and Lopez was scheduled to close at six PM.  
  
His three best salesmen, Peter Romero, James Gorshin, and John Meredith, were busy giving their spiels to interested customers, so Mr. Crosswire figured he would handle the tall, well-dressed man who had seemed to walk onto the lot out of nowhere. The visitor was a tall (well over six feet) rabbit man, with bushy blond hair and an unkempt mustache, who wore a classy brown suit, a gray ascot tie, and brown patent leather shoes. He began to walk along a row of Chryslers and scanned them with a calm, analytical expression, suggesting either great learning, or a desire to appear intelligent in order to discourage the salesmen from taking advantage of him.  
  
"Welcome to Crosswire Motors," Ed Crosswire greeted him, extending a friendly hand. The blond rabbit man turned his clear blue eyes toward the lot owner, with a gaze suggesting that he already knew everything about the man and was impatient with introductions. "My name's Ed Crosswire."  
  
The finely-dressed customer slowly extended a hand. He did not smile as Mr. Crosswire responded with a firm, welcoming shake. "My name is Winslow," he stated articulately but indifferently. "Angus Winslow. I'm interested in purchasing a car." He pronounced "car" as "cah", leading Mr. Crosswire to believe that the man had deep roots in the eastern seaboard.  
  
"I'm pleased to meet you," responded Mr. Crosswire as he released the gentleman's hand. "You don't sound like someone from around here."  
  
"I'm from the Boston area," Angus Winslow replied without hesitation. "Salem, to be precise."  
  
As Mr. Crosswire led the visitor through the car lot, he commented on his Salem experiences. "Salem's a great place to visit," he rambled on. "My wife and my daughter and I go there every year around Halloween. It's crowded, but it's fun."  
  
"Salem has much more to offer than witch tourism," said Mr. Winslow without changing his tone.  
  
"Yes, of course." Mr. Crosswire struggled to recall even one of Salem's non-witch-related attractions. "There's a Dunkin Donuts that we love to visit. What sort of work do you do in Salem?"  
  
"I'm curator of a witch museum," Winslow answered as he came to a stop alongside Mr. Crosswire in front of a yellow '89 Cutlass. "Tourism has been very good to me."  
  
"And what brings you to Elwood City?" asked Mr. Crosswire curiously.  
  
"I've come to see a local family about the purchase of a historic artifact," the rabbit man replied.  
  
It didn't take long for Ed Crosswire to guess which of the families of his acquaintance might possess souvenirs of the Salem witch-trial era, but he knew he had to attend to business before one of his salesmen butted in. He gestured grandly at the yellow Cutlass, whose paint was somewhat blotched and faded. "I'm running a special on this one. The exterior can use some work, but inside, it's solid as a rock. Its owner was an old lady who only used it for grocery shopping and bingo games. It comes with a five-year warranty on parts and labor..."  
  
Mr. Crosswire stopped suddenly when the serious-looking Winslow raised his right hand, on which he wore a large jade-hued ring, and waved it back and forth several times in front of the car dealer's nose. Uncertain as to the meaning of this action, Crosswire went on. "Did I say 'solid as a rock'? That was an exaggeration. It sorely needs a new transmission, and all the belts are old and frayed. As an honest man, I can't ask for five thousand. I'll give it to you for two thousand. Heck, I'll just give it to you."  
  
"Thank you, but no," said Winslow with a tone of finality. Turning on his brown patent leather heel, he strode away from Mr. Crosswire and the car lot without another word.  
  
Crosswire stroked his chin quizzically. He had just made the most generous offer of his life, devoid of any deceit whatsoever, and he had been turned down. This Angus Winslow was a strange man indeed.  
  
The sun was quickly vanishing behind the hills, and the air was starting to nip at his exposed face. He called to his three salesmen. "Hey, guys. Once you're finished with our guests, you can all go home. It's a beautiful day. Enjoy it before it's over." He worked them too hard anyway, he told himself.  
  
A block away, Angus Winslow paused on the sidewalk next to a hydrant and looked back toward the Crosswire lot. With an air of authority and menace, he muttered to no one in particular, "His time will soon come."  
  
TBC 


	2. A Look into the Future

One month later...  
  
The first thing that startled Buster after he disembarked the plane with his parents was an article in the Elwood Times. An old duck woman, sitting in the terminal at the Katzenellenbogan Airport, had left a local news section lying in the seat next to her while she giggled at the comics. Buster, glimpsing a familiar face in a photo, asked the woman if he could take the part of the paper she had finished and read it.  
  
"Go ahead, young man," said the duck woman with a toothy grin. Before Buster had a chance to ask himself whether ducks should have teeth, the smiling woman introduced herself. "My name's Betty. What's yours?"  
  
"Uh, Buster Baxter, ma'am," Buster replied a bit nervously. His parents, Bitzi Baxter and Harry Mills, stood behind him and scowled impatiently, as if they disapproved of their son starting up a conversation with a stranger, or simply wanted to get to their hotel room as quickly as possible so they could take off their coats and sweaters.  
  
"I'm so happy to meet you," Betty said to Buster as she patted him on the shoulder. For an instant Buster thought he could see tears forming in the woman's eyes, as if she had recognized him as her long-lost grandson.  
  
"And I'm glad to meet..." Buster began, but stopped when the corner of his eye caught a headline in the newspaper section he was holding: SEARCH CONTINUES FOR MISSING GIRL. The picture underneath featured the face of...  
  
"Omigosh!" cried Buster as he turned to his parents, who were resting their carry-on bags on the floor. "Mom, Dad, look! It's Prunella!"  
  
Surprised, Bitzi snatched the paper from her son's hand. "Prunella? Missing?" she exclaimed. "That's awful! She's been lost for ten days! And look at all the spelling errors in this article!"  
  
"That poor, poor girl." Betty shook her head sadly. "All the police in town are looking for her. Of course, they have nothing better to do."  
  
"What do you mean?" Harry asked the woman.  
  
"There hasn't been a single crime reported since the day that girl disappeared," Betty explained. "And everybody's nice to each other all the time. I walk down the street and everyone smiles and waves at me, even people I don't know. Just yesterday my landlord told me I could have an extension on my rent if I needed one, and he's always been a mean, stingy man."  
  
"Weeeeiiiirrrrd," said Buster in hushed amazement.  
  
The old duck woman then grabbed him by the shoulder and drew him closer, so that his ears were level with her beak. "I think it's aliens," she whispered.  
  
As Buster and his parents took their leave of the woman, they began to notice that the people in the crowded terminal were behaving, by and large, unusually. While on previous visits to the airport they had been surrounded by mainly scowling, self-absorbed passengers and a few smiling airline employees, on this occasion nearly everyone wore a cheerful smile. It reminded Buster of the few times he had gone to church with his mother's family, where everybody knew each other and wished each other well. Now and then someone would hand a compliment to his parents, such as, "What a handsome little boy!" or, "With those ears, I bet he can hear for miles." Some even offered him pieces of candy, but his mother had instructed him to never take food from strangers.  
  
As they waited at the baggage claim, Harry remarked to Bitzi about the unexpected increase in friendliness. "If you ask me, Mayor Cook's pumping a bunch of money into improving the city's public image."  
  
"If Mayor Cook had anything to do with it," Bitzi quipped, "nobody would be smiling."  
  
The auto rental clerk seemed to go out of her way to make Bitzi, Harry, and Buster feel happy and comfortable, even offering a special discount beyond what they had obtained through their travel agency. Before long they had left their winter gear in the hotel room (Chicago being in the grip of a cold snap) and were on the road, heading toward the neighborhood where Buster had once lived along with his Lakewood Elementary classmates.  
  
"So, who should we visit first?" asked Harry Mills as he pulled into the highway offramp.  
  
"Arthur!" shouted Buster without hesitation. "And then Francine, and The Brain, and Sue Ellen, and..."  
  
Several minutes later, as the car pulled to a stop in front of the Read home, Buster was still rattling off the names of the old friends he wished to visit. "...and Mrs. McGrady, and Ms. Turner the librarian, and Principal Haney, and Toby, and Slink, and the Molinas, and Camp Counselor Becky..."  
  
Excitement filled Buster's heart as he hurried toward the door with his parents. He was about to be reunited with his good aardvark friend Arthur Read, who he hadn't seen for months. The door swung open and Mr. and Mrs. Read appeared in the doorway, looking for the most part as he remembered them. It didn't surprise him that they were smiling and happy like the people at the airport and the hotel, as he had expected them to greet him in that manner. No, what surprised him was something else.  
  
Peering between the legs of Arthur's parents into the living room of the house, he saw Arthur, D.W., and an unfamiliar, dark-complexioned boy sitting together on the couch, smiling vapidly while they watched TV. His sensitive ears picked up the sound from the television, and recognized it as...Mary Moo Cow!  
  
Buster almost fell backwards from the shock. Arthur and D.W. watching Mary Moo Cow together? Without fighting? And enjoying it? How was this possible?  
  
Was it something they had put in the water supply while he was gone?  
  
The three kids leaped from the couch and scurried from the living room when they saw Buster in the doorway. "Buster! Buster!" yelled Arthur, who then did something he had never been known to do before. He ran right up to Buster, threw his arms around the boy, and...hugged him.  
  
The embarrassed Buster feared that he would choke. "Mom!" he cried. "Get my inhaler!"  
  
Arthur introduced his new housemate, Adil, to Buster as Bitzi reached into her purse to retrieve Buster's inhaler. "This is Adil Faruk, from Turkey."  
  
"I am pleased to meet you," said Adil, shaking Buster's hand.  
  
Buster grinned. "I remember you. Did you ever tell me what lamb's eyes taste like?"  
  
Once he had inhaled a bit of asthma medication, Buster followed Arthur, D.W., and Adil into the living room. At first he was hesitant to look at the TV screen, suspecting that some sort of subliminal foul play had transformed his old pal into a Moo fan. When he did look, he noticed that Mary and her young acolytes had been joined by a new character, a dancing calf with a clown face.  
  
"That's New Moo Revue," said D.W., pointing at the TV screen. "Mrs. Stiles is Mary Moo Cow."  
  
"You're kidding!" exclaimed Buster in astonishment. "Mrs. Stiles? Is she trying to revive her acting career?"  
  
"The little cow is named Mini Moo," D.W. continued. "That's Binky, but the voice is Fern."  
  
"No way." Buster shook his head incredulously. "I don't believe it. Binky in a cow costume?"  
  
"I didn't believe it either," Arthur told him.  
  
As Buster sat next to his friends on the couch, he asked the question that had been burning in his mind. "Why are you watching this, Arthur? What happened to Bunny League?"  
  
"The local station doesn't carry Bunny League anymore," Arthur replied. "Or Bionic Bunny, or Laura Cleft, or Rat Woman. Those action cartoons are too violent for kids."  
  
Buster became more stunned with every passing second. Arthur watching Mary Moo Cow...Bunny League dropped from the lineup...Binky dancing around in a cow costume...what had Elwood City come to?  
  
It only got weirder as he visited his other friends. Muffy handing out fifty-dollar bills to passing strangers. Francine decorating the walls of her bedroom with travel posters, and Catherine not objecting. Sue Ellen's family leaving suddenly for a mysterious emergency mission. Quinn Cooper shopping for clothes with Muffy. Van and Beat hanging out with the now cleanly-attired Molly and Rattles. The new girl, Mavis, who had a memory gap a year long. Curiouser and curiouser...  
  
...and then he visited The Brain.  
  
Alan, surprisingly, didn't seem as blissfully happy as the other kids. On the contrary, he looked weary and glum. Buster had never seen him so obviously depressed, even after they had competed in the third-grade Mathathon and Alan had inexplicably lost. "Come into my bedroom," he invited Buster as their parents were engaged in friendly chatter. "I need to talk to you about something."  
  
Buster followed Alan into the bedroom, hoping to obtain some clue as to the boy's exhausted emotional state. Alan closed the door after them, then sat down on his bed. Buster noticed that the "I Have a Dream" poster on the wall had come loose in one corner and was hanging crooked, so he busied himself in correcting it.  
  
Alan sighed. "It's nice to get a chance to talk to somebody who isn't...perfect," he remarked dolefully.  
  
"What's going on, Alan?" asked Buster as he seated himself in a chair. "Prunella's disappeared, all my friends are acting weird, the whole city's acting weird. It's not aliens, is it? I know it can't be aliens."  
  
Alan shook his head weakly. "It's not aliens, Buster. It's something worse."  
  
Buster gaped. What could possibly be worse than an alien takeover?  
  
"I was the last person to see Prunella," Alan went on, his voice tinged with fear. "I don't know where she is now. I don't know if she's alive or dead. She was there one minute, the next she was gone."  
  
"Was she abducted?" asked Buster breathlessly.  
  
"Seems that way," Alan replied. "There's an evil force at work, Buster. It hasn't shown itself since it took Prunella ten days ago. I don't know if or when it'll come back, but if it does come back, then the whole city's in danger...maybe even the world."  
  
The world? Buster couldn't believe his ears, accurate as they were. First the imminent extinction of the banana...and now the impending destruction of the world?  
  
"It all started about a month ago," Alan continued, "when a man named Angus Winslow came into town."  
  
TBC 


	3. A Matter of Principal

"The government would like you to believe that the 1947 UFO sighting near Roswell, New Mexico was an illusion or hoax," Mr. Baker lectured his fifth- graders. It was afternoon on a Tuesday, and the sun smiled through the windows of the classroom, inviting the kids to enjoy the increasingly warm weather of late February. "Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't," Mr. Baker went on. "But one thing I'm sure of. Space aliens are among us, because I have met some."  
  
Alan, who sat between Prunella and Marina at the front of the classroom, quickly raised his hand. The stocky hippo man ignored him and continued with his questionable story. "Back when I was in the Air Force, stationed in the Nevada desert, I visited a secret installation where..."  
  
Unable to endure any more, Alan raised his hand again and immediately began to speak. "Mr. Baker, sir, according to Einstein's theory of relativity, there's no way space aliens could ever make it to Earth. The nearest inhabitable planet is thousands of light years away, and..."  
  
"Don't interrupt me, Mr. Powers," the teacher said firmly and gruffly. "Just for that, you can stay after school."  
  
It was a long, painful five minutes before the final bell rang, and the students began to put on their coats and pick up their bags. Alan didn't rise, but stared somberly at the top of his desk. He felt a powerful urge to pick up an Xacto knife from art class, and start engraving a cartoon in the wood. He pictured a hippopotamus with an enormous head, four arms, and antennae, descending from a pizza-shaped starship and proclaiming to the frightened humans, "I Come in Pizza."  
  
He felt a gentle tap on his shoulder, and turned to see the grinning face of Prunella. "Come over to my place when you're done," she invited him. "I have an idea for our history report."  
  
"Sure, Prunella," he agreed. The class had been divided into teams four days previous, and assigned to write ten-page reports on a historical event of their choosing. Alan was sure that his teammate Prunella had come up with a strange and colorful idea, like "The History of Fertilizer from the Paleozoic to Modern Times". He favored more relevant subjects, but weirdness was the way to get ahead in the topsy-turvy world of Ralph "Half-Baked" Baker.  
  
Soon everybody else had gone, and Alan was alone with the hippo, who laid a thick gray hand on his desk and glared at him. "I suppose you think I'm crazy," said Mr. Baker menacingly.  
  
Only one sentence had been spoken, and Alan already didn't like where the conversation was heading. "I shouldn't have interrupted you, sir," he said contritely. "I'm sorry."  
  
Mr. Baker pretended not to hear the apology. "You thought I was crazy when I told you about the unicorns. But I'll have you know that I've seen hundreds of unicorns. Your friends Arthur and Francine were with me at the time. Ask them, they'll back me up."  
  
"I did ask them," Alan replied calmly. "They denied it."  
  
Mr. Baker slowly stepped backwards until his back rubbed against the chalkboard. "So you don't believe in aliens," he said thoughtfully. "You think we're alone in the universe."  
  
"The chances of Earth being the only planet in the universe with intelligent life are astronomically small," said Alan in a cold, scientific voice. "But according to Einstein's theory of relativity..."  
  
"Einstein, Schmeinstein," Mr. Baker grumbled. "The aliens figured out how to break the light barrier millions of years ago. You've been brought up on Euclidean geometry. You think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But the aliens know that the shortest distance between two points is zero."  
  
"That's crazy," Alan retorted.  
  
"Ha!" The teacher pointed at Alan in triumph. "You're questioning my sanity again."  
  
Alan sighed impatiently. "No, I didn't say 'you're crazy'. I said 'that's crazy'."  
  
"You're talking about eons of scientific research conducted on other worlds," said Mr. Baker in a dramatic tone. "Einstein, Schroedinger, Oppenheimer...they were all clueless imbeciles."  
  
"All right," Alan challenged him. "Explain to me how the aliens got around the light barrier."  
  
"There is no light barrier." Mr. Baker walked up to Alan and tapped the boy's head with his knuckle. "The only barrier is right here."  
  
It was no use. Alan wondered why he had been so anxious to skip fourth grade.  
  
Once his detention was over, he wandered about the mostly empty center court for a few minutes, pondering what to do about his increasingly grating teacher. Noticing that the door to the principal's office was hanging open, he started to make his way toward it, thinking a little talk with his good friend Herbert Haney might cheer him up at least, if it failed to solve his problem.  
  
Poking his head through the doorway, he was surprised to see someone behind the desk whom he had never expected to see at the school again...  
  
"Mr. Ratburn?"  
  
The former third-grade teacher swiveled his pointy nose toward Alan and grinned.  
  
"That's Principal Ratburn."  
  
TBC 


	4. Locket or Lose It

"Where's Mr. Haney?" asked Alan as he stepped inside the principal's office.  
  
"He's experiencing health problems," replied Mr. Ratburn, who then plucked a lollipop from a mug on the desk and began to idly unwrap it. "The school board needed a temporary replacement on short notice, and I was their first choice."  
  
A bit astonished, Alan pulled himself into the seat facing the principal's desk. "I thought the school board asked you to quit," he reflected.  
  
"They apologized for that," Mr. Ratburn told him. "The feds are losing interest in Angela's case anyway, now that the statute of limitations is almost up. It seems unlikely that they'll bring any action against me."  
  
"That's good," said Alan. "I mean, I wouldn't want you to go to jail or anything."  
  
Mr. Ratburn smiled and took a deep relaxing breath. "So, what brings you here, Alan?" he asked in a friendly tone.  
  
Alan looked down at his feet. "It's...it's my teacher. He's got these weird theories about things like unicorns and space aliens, and he's always talking about them in class."  
  
"Mm-hmm," said Ratburn thoughtfully.  
  
"I wish he would stop, but I can't do anything about it. When I complain, he makes me stay after school."  
  
Principal Ratburn's expression grew slightly darker. "I'll have a talk with him," he told Alan.  
  
A few minutes later, as Alan was walking away from the school in the direction of Prunella's, he passed George's house and saw George and Muffy sitting on the mostly-dead grass of the front lawn, their packs sitting open next to them. "Hey, guys," he hailed them.  
  
"Hi, Alan," said Muffy and George in unison. Because of the unusually warm weather, they were dressed in springwear.  
  
"I'm glad you decided to pass by," Muffy told Alan. "We could use a third brain right now."  
  
Alan pushed his way through the gate leading into George's yard. "What's up?" he asked helpfully.  
  
"Mr. Wald made teams and assigned us to write a report about a recent scientific development," George informed him. "Muffy and I are a team, and we're trying to think of something really cool to write about."  
  
Alan scratched his chin. "I don't know...Muffy ought to be really good at science after all the time she spent at Uppity Downs."  
  
"Not...even," Muffy shot back.  
  
After a few seconds of thought, Alan proposed an idea. "I got the latest Popular Science last week, and there was a cover story about the space elevator."  
  
"Space elevator?" Muffy repeated. "You mean, like, an elevator that goes into outer space?"  
  
Alan nodded. "It hasn't been built yet, but scientists are talking about it."  
  
"How would you build something like that?" George inquired wonderingly.  
  
"Carbon nanotubes," Alan answered.  
  
"Carbon what-o-tubes?" asked Muffy, thoroughly confused.  
  
"Nanotubes," said Alan. "As in, very small tubes. They're lighter and stronger than steel."  
  
"If they're so small," Muffy observed, "you'd need billions and billions of them to reach outer space."  
  
"That's a good idea," said George. "Thanks, Alan."  
  
"No problem." Alan turned, exited through the gate, and continued down the sidewalk.  
  
Muffy turned to George. "Imagine what we could do with an elevator that goes into space," she mused.  
  
Lapsing into a fantasy sequence, Muffy imagined a rectangular column that seemed to stretch from one end of the galaxy to the other. A huge glass elevator car was descending through it, and inside of it stood a family of gigantic alien creatures with eyestalks and tentacles. They consisted of a mother with horn-rimmed glasses, a father who wore what looked like a baseball cap, a little boy in a striped shirt, and a little girl with a mop of blond hair on what appeared to be her head.  
  
"Daddy, are we there yet?" asked the little alien girl.  
  
"Just another four light-years," replied the alien father.  
  
"Now, remember, kids," said the alien mother, "the little pink things that wear rags are people, so don't step on them."  
  
"Can we take one home?" asked the alien boy excitedly.  
  
"Maybe, if you promise to clean up after it," replied the mother.  
  
Shortly the elevator car came to a stop, and the doors slid open to reveal a vast hall resembling a convention center. Rows of information booths extended as far as the eyestalk could see in all directions, while creatures of many different cosmic races wandered from booth to booth, listening to the spiels of the human presenters.  
  
"This is so cool!" exclaimed the alien girl. "Is this Earth, Daddy?"  
  
"No, this is just the welcome center," the alien father told her.  
  
As the foursome wriggled out of the elevator car and into the enormous hall, a hologram of Muffy, wearing a red and white dress and stockings, flickered into existence before them. "Welcome to the planet Earth," she said in a somewhat static-filled voice. "I'm Muffy Crosswire, Fashion Consultant to the Stars. You may think it's hard to blend in on Earth when you're an ugly green alien monster, but I'm here to give you a few pointers that will make the job easier. First, clothes. Green is associated with spring, so spring colors are your best bet. As for the tentacles, it's a good idea to leave a little bit of the tip showing, but not too much, especially if there are suckers on the end. Second, hairstyles. Hairstyles, you ask? But I have snakes for hair! Well, believe it or not..."  
  
Meanwhile, on the Earth's surface below, all of the visiting alien females, and even a few of the males, were wearing red and white dresses patterned after Muffy's (with variations for multiple arms and heads where necessary).  
  
While Muffy daydreamed, Alan arrived at Prunella's house and was welcomed in by her mother, Drusilla Prufrock. The woman was clad in a green polka-dot dress, with bead bracelets covering her arms and a red bandanna over her frizzy, mousy-brown hair. "Is Prunella home?" Alan asked her.  
  
"She's upstairs," Mrs. Prufrock replied.  
  
As Alan walked toward the stairway, he noticed that a tall rabbit man with blond hair and a mustache was sitting in an antique chair in front of an old coffee table. The man rose as Alan drew closer, but the boy was attracted by something else--a small, round object lying on the tabletop. It was metallic, gold-colored, and somewhat tarnished, with leaflike engravings on its surface. His first impression was that it might be a case containing a fabulous diamond. Somehow he knew that it was of tremendous value, and he felt compelled to pick it up and handle it...  
  
"Ah..." said the rabbit man, who had placed his large hand over the object to thwart Alan's attempt to touch it.  
  
Alan suddenly felt embarrassed. He had failed to greet, and had hardly acknowledged, the tall stranger to whom the object might possibly belong, but had allowed curiosity to overwhelm him. How could he have been so impolite?  
  
"Uh, I'm Alan Powers, sir," he said anxiously.  
  
"Angus Winslow," the rabbit man replied. Since his right hand was guarding the object, he made no offer to shake hands with the boy. "Sorry to be so protective, but the locket has great historical significance, and I'd rather not allow just anyone to touch it." As Alan stepped back, the jade-colored ring on Winslow's right hand caught his attention. It appeared at first to be a class ring, but there were no markings on it.  
  
At that moment Prunella came down the stairway. "Oh, Alan, you're here," she greeted him. "This is Mr. Winslow from Salem. He wants to buy great-aunt Hannah's locket and put it in a witch museum." Winslow sat down again, but did not remove his hand from the locket.  
  
"A witch museum?" Alan repeated with curiosity.  
  
"Have a seat and I'll tell you the whole story," Winslow offered.  
  
Mrs. Prufrock gestured toward an old cushioned chair, and Alan seated himself in it. "I don't know if Prunella told you this," Winslow began, "but she has ancestors who lived in Davenport, New Hampshire during the time of the Purge."  
  
"What purge?" asked Alan.  
  
"When you think of witch trials, the first place you think of is Salem," said Winslow as Prunella and her mother took seats next to Alan. "And that's how it should be. However, many other places in New England had witch problems at the same time. In Davenport, thirty-two women, all part of the same family, were hanged for witchcraft between 1662 and 1669."  
  
"Interesting," said Alan. "What about the men?"  
  
"The men were left alone," Winslow replied. "Apparently Reverend Matheson thought that only female witches were a threat. By the time he was finished, only one woman survived out of the entire family."  
  
"Charity Proctor," Prunella chimed in. "My great-great-great-great-whatever grandmother on my father's side."  
  
"Charity had a sister named Hannah," Mrs. Prufrock added, "who was hanged. She had a daughter named Dolores, who disappeared and was never heard from again. The locket belonged to Hannah, and has a picture of Dolores in it."  
  
"I thought we could write our history report about the Davenport Purge," Prunella said to Alan.  
  
"That's a good idea," said Alan, smiling. "Let's get started right away."  
  
Prunella led Alan up the stairway leading to her room, while Mr. Winslow stood, lifted his hand, and admired the locket again. Turning to Mrs. Prufrock, who had also risen, he said, "Fifty thousand dollars, ma'am. I may be able to convince my associates to go higher, but I doubt it."  
  
Mrs. Prufrock smiled condescendingly. "That's a generous offer, and I can't say I'm not tempted. However, the locket has great meaning to our family. Every time we open it, we're reminded of everything we stand for and hold precious. And you can't put a price on that."  
  
Winslow lowered his head, apparently disappointed. "Very well, ma'am. If you should reconsider, you know how to contact me." He shook hands with the woman, who was more than a foot and a half shorter. "Good day, ma'am."  
  
"Will you be staying the night here?" Mrs. Prufrock asked him.  
  
"No, ma'am," he answered. "I'm going to drop in on an old friend, then I'll be on my way back to Salem."  
  
Mrs. Prufrock held the door open for Winslow as he departed. After closing the door, she went to the coffee table and carefully placed the locket in the palm of her hand. The latch had long ago worn off, so she lifted up the top half to reveal a crude, faded drawing of a little rat girl who wore a white bonnet over her long brown hair. The girl was not smiling; her dour expression seemed to convey the message, "Is this all I have to look forward to?"  
  
----  
  
Arthur, seated on the floor, was playing a sonata on a toy piano on which sat a stern-looking bust of Beethoven. As he practiced, Francine walked into the room, smiling vacuously. Lowering herself onto her back, she rested her head on the edge of the piano opposite Arthur, and allowed the music to wash over her.  
  
"Green or yellow, Arthur?" she said wistfully.  
  
"Green or yellow what?" asked Arthur without breaking his pace.  
  
"The drapes in the house we'll build with our own hands after we get married," Francine answered.  
  
Suddenly angry, Arthur grabbed the toy piano and yanked it away, sending the bust of Beethoven flying and Francine's head crashing to the floor with a thud.  
  
Or so he imagined.  
  
In reality, he and Francine were sitting on chairs in front of the desk in Arthur's bedroom, discussing the joint assignment Mr. Wald had given them.  
  
"Buster called me on Sunday," Arthur told Francine. "He and his parents are all set to come out and visit in a month. And he said something about bananas. Like, the whole world will run out of bananas because of some fungus."  
  
"Oh, that would be just terrible," said Francine dreamily. Arthur could just hear her adding, "But I can live without bananas. It's you I can't live without, Arthur. I love you..."  
  
"Think about it," said Arthur, looking away from Francine and toward the blank sheet of paper on his desk. "No more bananas. Hey, I just thought of a joke. A guy walks into the Sugar Bowl and asks for a banana split. The server says there are no bananas left. So he splits."  
  
Francine giggled. "That's funny, Arthur."  
  
Arthur sighed and straightened his glasses. "For someone with two people in your head," he said with an annoyed tone, "you're not acting very intelligent."  
  
Francine shook her head as if trying to dislodge a rock. "I'm sorry, Arthur," she said meekly. "It's just that whenever we're together, I forget myself, and Sue Ellen takes over, and my brain turns to mush."  
  
"Well, try to fight it," Arthur urged her. "Now, I thought it would be a good idea to write a report about bananas, and why they may become extinct, and what's being done scientifically to save them."  
  
"Ecuador is the world's biggest exporter of bananas," Francine informed him. "Costa Rica is second. I went to a banana plantation in Costa Rica once. There were so many bananas that..."  
  
"Can I talk to Francine now?" Arthur snapped at her.  
  
At the same time, D.W. and Nadine were seated on the couch, watching and greatly enjoying New Moo Revue. They were especially intrigued by the new character Mini Moo, a clownish calf who danced gracefully and sang beautifully.  
  
In the current segment, Mini Moo was standing on his tiptoes (the character's gender had never been firmly established, but most assumed he was male, since he had no eyelashes) in the middle of the state of Washington, part of a large diorama of the fifty U.S. states. In his girlish voice he announced, "And now I will dance through all the fifty states. When I dance into a new state, I want you to say the name of the state really loud."  
  
Mini Moo began to pirouette and leap through the states, while D.W. and Nadine followed along, shouting as loudly as they could, "Washington! Oregon! California!"  
  
In the kitchen, Mr. Read sat at one end of the table reading the newspaper, while his wife sat at the other end, feeding baby Kate. Suddenly their idyllic peace and tranquility were interrupted when the doorbell rang. "I'll get it," Mr. Read offered.  
  
As he bent over and looked through the peephole, all he saw was a gray ascot tie. Then he opened the door, and the view didn't change. He was standing in the presence of an unusually tall, finely dressed rabbit man, who sported a grin the size of...  
  
"Texas! Oklahoma! Kansas!"  
  
"Hello, Dave," said the stranger to Mr. Read.  
  
Studying the man's face carefully, Mr. Read struggled to recall where or when they might have met before. Then he remembered, and a delighted smile spread across his face.  
  
"Gus!" he exclaimed. "Gus Winslow!"  
  
TBC  
  
----  
  
Author's Notes:  
  
The witch trials in Davenport, NH are fictional. There is no city named Davenport in New Hampshire. But you knew that, duh.  
  
P.S. Sebastian, I haven't seen any of the Freddy Krueger movies, so I'm not informed enough to add him to my story. There will be magic, evil, and horror in this story, but no Freddy, sorry. Feel free to write an Arthur/Freddy crossover of your own. 


	5. Malleus Maleficarum

"Gus, come on in!" said Mr. Read as he enthusiastically shook the rabbit man's hand. "I haven't seen you in years! What've you been doing?" 

"You shouldn't need to ask that," replied the smirking Winslow. Mrs. Read rose politely to her feet as the man stepped into the kitchen. "I'm Witch Boy Winslow, remember?"

"I'm, uh, pleased to meet you," said Mrs. Read, extending a hand.

"This is my wife, Jane," Mr. Read told Winslow, who greeted the woman warmly. "Jane, this is Angus Winslow. We went to high school together in Newhaven."

"You picked a good one, Dave," said Winslow, admiring Mrs. Read's attractive face. "I wasn't so lucky. We fought for a year, then we split up."

"Sorry to hear that," said Mr. Read. "So you've been in Salem all this time, working at the witch museum?"

"I'm curator now," Winslow informed him.

Mr. Read turned to his wife. "Gus gave up a basketball scholarship from Chapel Hill to go into the family business," he explained. "They own a witch museum in Salem. We used to call him Witch Boy Winslow because he talked about witchcraft and witch trials all the time."

"I'm quite knowledgeable about the subject," Winslow boasted. "I can recite the entire text of the _Malleus Maleficarum_, in either English or Latin."

"The what?" Mr. Read became confused.

"_The Hammer of Witches_," Winslow translated. "An anti-witch guide for inquisitors. It came out in 1486."

"That's very interesting," said Mrs. Read insincerely. "Now why don't we go into the living room where we can sit and chat?"

"An excellent idea," Winslow agreed.

He followed the Read parents into the living room, where D.W. and Nadine were still on the couch, engrossed in their children's TV show. "Girls," Mrs. Read said to them, "we have a guest in the house, so it's time to turn off the TV."

"But, Mom!" D.W. whined. "We're watching New Moo Revue!"

Winslow turned to Mr. Read and complimented him. "What lovely girls. The one with the tail is yours, I take it."

"You and Nadine can go upstairs and play with your toys," Mrs. Read told D.W.

"But I wanna watch New Moo Revue!" D.W. complained bitterly.

While the two argued, Nadine jumped down from the couch and stood in front of Winslow, looking up and down at the man in wonder. "Wow, you're really tall, mister," she remarked.

"You can call me Gus," said Winslow, bending over to pat the girl on the head.

"My name's Nadine Harris," said Nadine, giggling bashfully.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Read was making no headway with the obstinate D.W. "Why do you have to turn off the TV when one of your friends comes over?" the girl protested.

"Because when one of our friends comes over, we like to talk instead of watching..." Mrs. Read began, but Winslow put up a hand to cut her off.

"Let me deal with this," offered the rabbit man. "Now, D.W., be a good little girl, and do what your mother says." As he spoke, he waved his right hand, on which he wore the jade-colored ring, back and forth in front of D.W.'s face.

A strange feeling came over D.W., and she began to realize that she was misbehaving, and should respect and obey her mother. A dopey smile spread over her face. "Yes, sir," she said cheerfully. Hopping down from the couch, she led Nadine up the stairs and into her bedroom.

Mrs. Read watched in astonishment as the girls made their exit, then turned to Winslow. "You're very good with children," she observed. "We should bring you on as a babysitter."

She turned off the television, then sat in a chair opposite her husband and Winslow, who had occupied the warm spots on the couch. "I think you'll find her easier to deal with now," Winslow told her. "For a little while, anyway."

----

At the same time, Alan and Prunella were seated on opposite ends of a small table in Prunella's bedroom, writing down ideas for their history report.

"Alvin Matheson was the reverend at the time," Prunella related. "Nobody really knows what his motivations were. The trials in Salem had a lot to do with politics and established local families, but Reverend Matheson had no connections when he moved to Davenport. He just showed up and started preaching against witches."

"Uh-huh," said Alan, who appeared to be gazing into the distance instead of paying attention.

"Charity Proctor had four sons," Prunella went on. "Their names were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They were all born within five years of each other. My dad's a descendant of Luke Proctor. For some reason they used their mother's last name instead of their father's. We still don't know who Charity's husband was."

"Right," mumbled Alan.

"Are you okay?" asked Prunella, noticing that the boy seemed almost to be in a trance.

Alan shook his head in frustration. "Oh, I'm sorry. I...I just can't get my mind off that locket."

"I don't think my mom's gonna sell it," Prunella opinionated. "I think she should. It's a lot of money, and I think it would be better to put the locket in a glass case and let everybody see it, than to just stow it in a trunk."

"It's in a trunk?" Alan suddenly looked startled. "Where?"

"In the attic," Prunella answered.

Moments later, Prunella was leading Alan up the stairway into the darkened attic of the Prufrock house. She pulled on a string that was hanging from the ceiling, causing a lightbulb to switch on. "I wonder if we should get my mom's permission first," she said to Alan as she made her way to a row of three old trunks sitting against the back wall.

"You don't have to let me touch it," Alan replied. "I just want to see what it looks like inside."

With a little effort, Prunella pushed open the lid of the center trunk. Alan secretly hoped that Mrs. Prufrock hadn't noticed the creaking sound (of course, rat people, with their tiny ears, didn't have very sensitive hearing).

Eagerness filled Alan's heart as Prunella reached into the ancient trunk. He had never felt so curious about anything in his life, not even cellular mitosis. It seemed as if the locket had some strange power over him...

"Here it is," Prunella announced quietly. She had one hand placed over the other as she withdrew her arms from the trunk. As she raised one arm to close the lid of the trunk, Alan gazed upon the gold-colored locket in her other hand and felt his self-control weakening. He lifted his hands in spite of himself. "Must...touch..." he said monotonically, unable to refrain from reaching for the precious keepsake...

...but as soon as he laid his fingers on the locket, it burst into flames.

"Argh!" cried Prunella in terror. The top half of the locket had flown off, hit the ceiling, and rebounded onto the floor; now both halves were belching fire. She quickly tossed away the part of the locket in her hand before it could singe her fingers. Snapped out of his trance by the sudden conflagration, Alan looked back and forth between his fingers and the two locket portions that lay erupting on the floor.

"Fire!" Prunella shouted, and raced toward the stairway leading down from the attic. Alan, too confused and frightened to follow, watched as the flames pouring from the locket halves gradually died down. Soon only wisps of smoke rose from them, and then those were quenched as well.

As he looked over the scorched remains of the locket, Alan realized he had done something seriously wrong. The heirloom had been quite valuable, both to the Prufrocks and Mr. Winslow, due to its historicity. He hadn't just broken a window or knocked over a scientific display--he had ruined something irreplaceable. The only thing he couldn't figure out was, how had he done it? Neither he nor Prunella had anything in their possession that might have started a blaze.

"Uh, pardon me," came a girl's voice from a few feet away.

At first Alan assumed that Prunella had returned with an extinguisher. He looked up from the damaged locket...and gasped in surprise.

Standing before him was not Prunella, but a girl the likes of which he had never seen before. She was a rat girl, a few inches shorter than Alan, wearing a pink, ruffled colonial dress that went all the way to the floor, and a white bonnet over her waist-length brown hair. She was glancing around the room with an expression of dizzy wonder, as if she had just arrived from another planet.

_I've gone back in time,_ was the first thought to enter Alan's mind. A quick look around at his surroundings reassured him that he was still in Prunella's attic.

The strange, anachronistically dressed girl looked at Alan and spoke. "Young lad, wilt thou kindly tell me what year this is?" Her accent was similar to Beat Simon's, only less refined.

Feeling uneasy about the destruction of the locket and the sudden appearance of a girl who seemed to have wandered in from the set of _Little House on the Prairie_, Alan took a few seconds to gather his courage. "It's 2004," he finally told her.

The girl's eyes went wide. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed. "Is it truly the year of our Lord two thousand and four?"

Alan nodded.

The colonially-dressed girl shook her head in disbelief. "Three hundred years," she muttered. Bending over, she laid her hand on one of the locket segments, only to withdraw her fingers and grimace when she felt the still-hot metal.

"Who are you?" asked Alan.

The girl straightened herself, grasped her skirt, lifted it up slightly, and curtsied. "My name is Dolores Maria Proctor," she told him. "Thou mayest call me Dolly."

TBC


	6. Dies Irae

Dolores Proctor...hadn't Alan just heard Prunella's mother mention a long-dead relative by that name? Surely this girl couldn't be who she claimed to be. Yet he had a distinct feeling that something was different about her--something that set her apart from every other girl he had met. It couldn't be love...he didn't believe in love at first sight.  
  
As Alan mused, the girl who had introduced herself as Dolores "Dolly" Proctor wandered over to a nearby window, where she stood and gazed in wonder at the surrounding neighborhood. After a few seconds she turned and asked Alan, "What place is this?"  
  
"It's Elwood City," replied Alan without moving from his location in front of the charred locket.  
  
"In which colony?" asked "Dolly".  
  
Although annoyed by the girl's insistence on pretending that she was from the past, Alan decided to play along, supposing he might be part of some silly charade. "Uh, they're not colonies anymore," he answered. "The United States became independent from Great Britain in..."  
  
Suddenly Prunella rushed up the stairway into the attic, clutching a large fire extinguisher. Hurrying toward where Alan was standing, she stopped when she noticed that the locket was no longer in flames, and that no fire was to be seen anywhere. "Oh, it's out," she said with relief.  
  
Dolly, upon seeing that another girl had entered the room, smiled and curtsied again. "Hello."  
  
Prunella whirled and screeched in terror when she saw the strange, oddly-dressed girl who had somehow appeared in the attic. Her panic caused her to squeeze the trigger of the extinguisher, shooting a chemical burst directly at Dolly's face. In an instant both girls were screaming with fright, and Dolly was covered from head to skirt in flame retardant.  
  
"Stop!" ordered Alan, putting his hand over Prunella's until she released the trigger. But then Prunella saw something that scared her even more...a hysterical-looking rat girl whose face, hair, and dress were completely white...  
  
"A ghost!" shrieked Prunella, and once again impulsively fired the extinguisher, coating Dolly with another layer of sodium bicarbonate.  
  
Alan quickly ripped the extinguisher from Prunella's hands. "Are you crazy?" he bellowed. "Come on, let's get her in the shower!"  
  
As Dolly whimpered and dolefully examined her chemical-soaked dress, Alan and Prunella grabbed her arms and started to lead her down the attic stairway and into the bathroom. Prunella immediately turned the shower water on to full blast, and pushed Dolly into the tub so that the water could rinse the sticky, mildly corrosive substance from her skin and clothing. She then took a bath sponge and began to scrub Dolly's face. "Alan, who is this girl?" she asked. "Where did she come from?"  
  
"She claims to be a relative of yours," Alan replied.  
  
While Prunella was trying to loosen the string that would allow her to remove Dolly's bonnet, her mother suddenly appeared in the doorway of the bathroom. "What's going on?" the woman asked.  
  
"Uh, hi, Mrs. Prufrock," said Alan anxiously. "Would you mind staying out of the attic long enough for me to come up with a convincing alibi?"  
  
His words had the opposite effect, unfortunately. Mrs. Prufrock hurried up the stairway toward the attic, and moments later, as Prunella was unbuttoning Dolly's waterlogged dress, she and Alan heard an anguished scream.  
  
Prunella pointed out the obvious. "We are in big trouble."  
  
"Don't worry," said Alan, who was helping her to pull off Dolly's chemical-stained dress. "I'll give her a complicated scientific explanation she won't understand."  
  
Alan and Prunella stood breathlessly as angry footsteps sounded from the stairway. Dolly, clad only in a pink petticoat, stockings, and brown cowhide shoes, tried to scrape the clinging flame retardant from her hands. Her dress lay at her feet, shower water pouring over it.  
  
Mrs. Prufrock stood in the doorway again, her face livid. "What happened?" she roared, holding up the two segments of the ruined locket.  
  
Then she saw Dolly's face...and dropped the locket pieces in shock.  
  
"My apologies, ma'am," Dolly said to her. "'Twas my fault the locket was damaged. I shall gladly go about the village doing chores until I have recompensed thee its full value."  
  
Her mouth gaping open, her face pale, Mrs. Prufrock slowly stepped out of the bathroom, turned, and leaned against the wall. "It's impossible," she mumbled to herself. "It's impossible..."  
  
----  
  
"I think every high school student should be required to read 'The Crucible'," Mr. Winslow told Mr. and Mrs. Read as they sat in the living room of the Read home. "Arthur Miller may have written it about McCarthyism, but it's also important to remember the Salem witch trials, so that nothing like that ever happens again."  
  
"You think it will?" asked Mrs. Read. "I mean, nobody believes in witches anymore, right?"  
  
"Wrong," replied Winslow. "Why, just the other day, I..."  
  
Then a musical ring tone was heard...it was the Dies Irae.  
  
"That must be for me," said Winslow, reaching for the cell phone attached to his belt. "Hello? Oh, Mrs. Prufrock. Have you had time to..."  
  
Winslow stopped talking, and his eyes started to grow wider and wider.  
  
"I'll be there right away," he said in a slow, hushed voice. Closing up his phone and rising to his size-14 feet, he announced, "I need to attend to some urgent business. Thanks for letting me visit you and your wife, Dave."  
  
The Reads also stood up. "I'm sorry you have to leave so soon," said Mr. Read. "You haven't met my son Arthur yet."  
  
"I'll come back tomorrow," said Winslow, who was making a hasty break for the front door. "I was planning on going home tonight, but my plans have changed."  
  
He was through the door and heading down the sidewalk before the Reads had a chance to shake hands with him.  
  
Mr. Read sighed happily. "Witch Boy Winslow. What a guy."  
  
"What kind of demented person uses the Dies Irae for a ring tone?" Mrs. Read wondered aloud.  
  
----  
  
The girl who called herself Dolly Proctor, wearing one of Prunella's dresses that was several sizes too large for her, sat on the couch in the Prufrock home, staring at the "box with moving pictures" known to modern people as the television. Next to her sat Prunella and her 16-year-old sister Rubella, who were enjoying the latest reality program.  
  
"I never dreamed it possible," mused Dolly, whose hair was still speckled with streaks of flame retardant. "A device that carries music and theatre from a faraway location to one's home."  
  
"I guess you didn't have TV in your century," said Rubella. "It wasn't invented until, like, 1900, I think."  
  
"Why are all the plays so short?" asked Dolly. "I attended a Shakespeare play and it lasted for hours. And why do the actors drink from bottles all the time?"  
  
"Those are called commercials," Rubella informed her.  
  
Dolly gestured toward the TV screen. "What is this play called?"  
  
"Mr. Face," Rubella answered. "This girl has to choose from, like, twenty guys, but the guys aren't allowed to talk, so she doesn't know anything about their personalities."  
  
"In my century, a woman would never have so much power over her life," said Dolly. "This century is so much more advanced."  
  
"Can't...look...away...from...screen," mumbled the bleary-eyed Prunella.  
  
The doorbell rang, and Mrs. Prufrock put her kitchen implements aside to answer it. Mr. Winslow once again towered over her. "Come in," she invited him.  
  
Winslow wasted no time. In a second he was standing next to the TV, thoughtfully scrutinizing Dolly's facial features. The girl, intrigued by the attention of a tall stranger, jumped to her feet and curtsied.  
  
"Incredible," he muttered.  
  
TBC 


	7. Speaking of Witch

"Once Alvin Matheson arrived, the entire town went witch-crazy," Dolly related to Alan, Mr. Winslow, and the Prufrocks, who listened with interest. "One by one, he accused the women in my family of witchcraft, and one by one, they were tried and hanged."  
  
"That's awful!" Rubella remarked. "And you were only a child when all of this happened."  
  
"In the middle of it all, my father abandoned us," Dolly went on. "In the end, all the women in the family were dead, except for my mother and aunt Charity. My mother knew they would come after her, so she devised a plan to protect me."  
  
"And what plan was that?" Winslow inquired.  
  
"My mother spent three years preparing a spell that would send me into the future," Dolly replied. "She enchanted the locket so that when it was touched by a child who was free of superstition, I would appear in that time and place. Thou art...er, you are that child, Alan."  
  
"Uh, I don't know about that," said Alan. "I don't believe in lucky charms or Friday the 13th or any of that stuff, but I don't know if that makes me free of superstition. I believe in God and I go to church, and some people think that's superstition."  
  
"Not if all you do is go to church," Prunella chimed in.  
  
"But I don't believe in witches, either," Alan added. "And you just told us that your mother was a witch."  
  
"My mother was a splendid witch," said Dolly proudly. "She was the first witch ever to perform a successful temporal spell. All the women in my family were witches. I'm a witch, too. Or I will be, when I grow up."  
  
"So when Reverend Matheson accused you all of being witches," Alan marveled, "he was right."  
  
"We only wanted to do good." Dolly's tone became plaintive. "But he told the townspeople that we were evil, and should be destroyed. He said all the time that he wanted to destroy all the evil in the world."  
  
"Maybe he should have started with himself," said Prunella indignantly.  
  
Alan turned to her. "You don't believe her, do you?"  
  
"I believed you when you said you traveled through time," Prunella responded.  
  
"I believe her," said Mrs. Prufrock. "She looks just like the picture in the locket, and her story agrees with our family history. You may think I'm crazy for believing someone can travel into the future, but I've seen stranger things."  
  
"As for me," said Mr. Winslow as he rose (and rose and rose), "I try to keep an open mind, but I'm not willing to believe things without some kind of evidence. I'll be in town until Sunday. That's how long you have to convince me, Dolly."  
  
"I have no interest in convincing thee...er, you, Mr. Winslow," Dolly said in reply.  
  
As Winslow departed the house, Prunella led Alan to her bedroom and the two consulted in private. "I don't know if she's crazy or not," Alan opinionated, "but her story sure is."  
  
"What's so crazy about time travel?" asked Prunella. "You've done it before."  
  
"Time travel isn't the problem," Alan replied slowly and thoughtfully. "If you get close enough to the speed of light, you can go as far into the future as you want. But you'd need a spaceship and a whole lot of fuel to do that. A bunch of witches living in 17th-century New Hampsire wouldn't be able to pull it off."  
  
"Unless they had a really big, really fast broom," Prunella joked.  
  
Alan chuckled, and his mood lightened. "At least one good thing will come of this. We're off the hook for what happened to your great-aunt Hannah's locket."  
  
----  
  
When Muffy appeared in the doorway of Prunella's house clutching a black satchel, she was out of breath and panting. "I had to walk all the way here from my house," she said to Alan and Prunella as they welcomed her inside. "My dad still hasn't hired me a new chauffeur. Oh, the pain...the pain..."  
  
"Thanks for letting Dolly borrow some of your dresses," said Prunella. "That's very considerate of you."  
  
"When I heard what happened, I just had to help," said Muffy as she followed the others up the stairway. "That poor girl. If I had to choose between being blasted with a fire extinguisher and dying in the fire..."  
  
They arrived in the attic and looked around. "She's not here," Alan noted.  
  
"Well, where is she?" whined Muffy. "Hurry up and find her. This bag is getting heavy."  
  
Then her ears picked up something. "Hey, did I just hear the toilet flush for, like, the third time?"  
  
The three kids hurried back down the stairway and into the bathroom, where they found the gleeful Dolly, who was still wearing one of Prunella's dresses. She was gazing into the toilet bowl as the water spiraled counter-clockwise and was sucked into the pipes. Turning to Muffy, Alan, and Prunella, she smiled and said, "What a splendid invention! A water bowl that makes things vanish!"  
  
"I see you've discovered the toilet," said Prunella facetiously.  
  
Upon seeing Muffy, Dolly curtsied again. "My name's Dolores, but you can call me Dolly."  
  
"I'm Mary Alice Crosswire," said Muffy as she set down her satchel and shook the girl's hand, "but you can call me Muffy." She could feel her heart breaking at the sight of the girl's discolored hair.  
  
"I asked Muffy to lend you some dresses that are your size," Prunella informed Dolly.  
  
Rather than thank Muffy, Dolly began to examine the hair ribbons tied to the ends of the girl's braids. "These are lovely," she commented. "May I borrow one of them?"  
  
"Uh, sure you can," said Muffy, looking a bit confused. Untying the ribbon on her left braid, she handed it to Dolly...who promptly dropped it into the toilet and pushed the handle.  
  
"Hey!" cried the alarmed Muffy. She watched in horror as the hair ribbon spun around and around, closer and closer to the black hole of no return. The only way to save it was to insert her hand into the toilet bowl. It was hopeless.  
  
Once the ribbon had disappeared into the void, Muffy turned to Dolly in anger. "You flushed my hair ribbon! Why did you do that?"  
  
Dolly smirked, stuck out her clenched right hand, opened her fingers...and there was the ribbon, perfectly dry. Muffy's jaw dropped in disbelief.  
  
"How...how did you..." Prunella stammered.  
  
"An illusion my mother taught me," Dolly explained. "Here, Muffy, take the ribbon."  
  
A bit hesitant, Muffy plucked the ribbon from Dolly's hand and began to tie it onto the end of her left braid. When she was done, she grinned at Dolly. "That was a cool trick. Do you do parties?"  
  
"Look in the mirror," said Dolly.  
  
Muffy turned and discovered, to her chagrin, that the ribbon was missing from her left braid. "Huh?" she blurted out. Thinking it might have fallen off, she began to glance around the floor.  
  
Once again Dolly held out her hand, opening her fingers to reveal the presence of the hair ribbon. Muffy slapped her forehead in frustration. Reaching for the ribbon again, she said, "This isn't another trick, is it?"  
  
"Not this time," Dolly reassured her. Muffy grabbed the ribbon, tied it onto her left braid, looked in the mirror, and found to her relief that the ribbon was in its proper place.  
  
"That was impressive," Alan said to Dolly, "but I still don't believe you're a witch."  
  
"And for your disbelief I am most grateful," Dolly responded.  
  
Prunella turned and stepped out of the bathroom. "Let's go, guys," she called. "Dolly needs to change."  
  
Alan and Muffy followed her and closed the door. Dolly glanced down at the satchel that Muffy had left behind, but the dresses contained therein didn't interest her, as she had secretly obtained a fascinating new toy. Lifting her hands, she began to playfully punch the buttons on Muffy's cell phone.  
  
TBC 


	8. And Now For My Next Trick

"Are you sure you won't stay for dinner?" Mrs. Prufrock asked Muffy, who was standing near the front door, making ready to leave. 

"Thanks, but I've already dined," Muffy replied. "Bailey prepared a fabulous Beef Wellington."

As they exchanged pleasantries, Dolly came slowly down the stairway, wearing a green dress with a knee-length plaited skirt, stockings, red buckle shoes, and a pink hair ribbon. Muffy walked over to her and examined her from head to toe. "It's a little loose around the waist," she commented, "but it'll have to do for now. If your parents don't come to get you, I'll take you shopping after school tomorrow."

"My parents have been dead for three hundred years," Dolly pointed out.

"Whatever." Muffy turned toward the door. "Nice meeting you, Dolly."

"You may want to take this with you." Dolly innocently held up Muffy's cell phone.

Muffy gasped. "What...how...why, you little trickster! Give me that!" Swiping the phone from Dolly's hand, she made haste for the door, scowling.

As Muffy exited, Dolly joined Prunella, Rubella, and Alan at the dinner table, where Mrs. Prufrock was starting to arrange the place settings. The smell of a pan pizza with mushrooms, olives, and artichokes wafted from the oven.

"Hey, Dolly, Prunella told me you can do magic tricks," Rubella said to Dolly as her mother placed a bowl full of breadsticks in the center of the table. "I'd like to see one."

"Oh boy," Alan muttered.

"Very well," said Dolly with a hint of impatience. "I will show you some magic tricks, as you so vulgarly call them."

"Oh, goody!" Prunella tapped her hands together excitedly.

Dolly gestured at the ceramic plate sitting before her. "Watch the plate carefully," she said as she began to wave her hands. "Lift not your eyes from the plate." Alan instead followed Dolly's hand movements, believing that she was trying to distract his gaze from some clever artifice she would attempt.

Then she waved her right arm over the plate, and it was no longer there.

Prunella blinked unbelievingly. Alan wondered what he had missed--it seemed to him that the plate had simply dissolved with no noise or movement when Dolly's arm passed over it. After a few seconds of astonishment, Prunella and Rubella began to applaud and cheer.

Alan, however, was still unconvinced. "Okay, where did you put it?" he asked petulantly.

"I put it nowhere," Dolly claimed. "It no longer exists. It is a non-plate."

"That's impossible," said Alan as Mrs. Prufrock laid a salad bowl on the table to his left. "It has to be somewhere. An object can't just disappear."

"Why not, Alan?" Prunella asked him. "Things disappear all the time. Haven't you ever lost a sock in the laundry?"

"That doesn't mean the sock no longer exists," Alan replied. "Sooner or later it turns up, or gets thrown away, or buried, or burned, or eaten up by moths. But it still exists somewhere, in some form. According to the law of conservation of matter, the amount of matter in the universe doesn't change. You can move or rearrange matter, but you can't create it or destroy it."

Dolly thoughtlessly waved her right arm again, causing the plate to reappear in its original location. "Oh thou who art so wise in the ways of science," she said tauntingly to Alan, "wouldst thou kindly pass me the container of garlic powder?"

The bottle of powdered garlic sat next to the salt and pepper; Alan grabbed it and handed it to Dolly, looking a little uncertain. "The women in my family have a gift for sensing the magical qualities of substances," Dolly boasted as she twisted the lid off the container. "Garlic, in particular, has many magical uses."

"Like warding off vampires," Prunella piped in.

"Vampires are legend." Dolly shook a small amount of garlic into her left palm. "But I'll show you a small example of what garlic can do."

Then, without warning, she blew into her palm, scattering the garlic powder into Alan's face. The boy suddenly felt overpowered by drowsiness. As the girls watched, his eyelids slammed shut and his head sank until his face rested on top of his dinner plate. "A foolproof cure for insomnia," proclaimed Dolly as Alan snored obliviously.

Prunella lifted her hand to tap on Alan's shoulder, but stopped when Dolly cleared her throat. "Before you wake him," she requested, "would you kindly go into the bathroom and retrieve the handheld mirror?"

Alan slumbered on as Prunella rose from her chair and made a quick trip to the bathroom. Returning with an ornately decorated hand mirror, she passed it to Dolly, wondering what amazing feat of legerdemain would follow.

"Glass has a number of magical properties," said Dolly, waving her fingers over the mirror. She handed it back to Prunella as the girl was shaking and arousing the startled Alan. "Now hold the mirror in front of you, as if to let me look into it."

"Huh? What?" mumbled the half-awake Alan.

As she held the mirror according to Dolly's instructions, Prunella noticed with alarm that Dolly was sprinkling another dash of garlic powder into her palm. "Who are you gonna put to sleep this time?" she inquired anxiously.

Without answering, Dolly blew the powdered garlic in Prunella's direction. Prunella winced as the powder flew into her hair and face, but to her surprise, she didn't feel at all sleepy.

This time it was Dolly herself who was overwhelmed by slumber. Her head fell lower and lower until the tip of her rat nose made contact with her plate. Then her head flopped to one side, and she began to snore blissfully.

Prunella laid down the mirror, reached across the table, and rubbed Dolly's temple. The girl quickly snapped into alertness, lifted her head, and went on as if nothing had happened. "I enchanted the glass to deflect the sleeping spell," she explained. Picking up the mirror and waving her hand over it again, she added, "Now it's enchanted again. You can deflect one spell per enchantment."

She gave the mirror back to Prunella, who stood up and went back into the bathroom to return it. "I think I can explain that one," Alan said to Dolly. "You put me to sleep with some kind of hypnotism. Then you faked falling asleep yourself."

"I'd like to see you make something else disappear," Rubella urged Dolly eagerly.

"I'd like to see you make_this_ disappear," said Mrs. Prufrock, who was removing the luscious-smelling pan pizza from the oven.

----

"He's a high school friend of Dave's," Mrs. Read related to Maria Harris, who was enjoying a cup of coffee with her in the Read kitchen. "A very tall fellow. From the sound of it he could have had a basketball career, but chose to run the family witch museum instead. He seems very intelligent and cultured. He has a way with kids, too. Ever since his visit, D.W. has been a perfect little angel."

"Hmm." Mrs. Harris' tail swung slowly from side to side as she took a sip of coffee. "Sounds like an interesting guy. I think I'd like to meet him."

"He's coming back tomorrow," Mrs. Read informed her.

In the living room, D.W. and Nadine were enjoying the peaceful evening in their own way. D.W. sat on the couch reading a children's book entitled "What to Expect in Your First Year of Elementary School", while Nadine frolicked about the room and Pal snoozed in a corner.

"I'm Mini Moo!" exclaimed Nadine as she performed one ballet leap after another. "I may be little, but I can do everything Mary Moo Cow can do!"

D.W. lowered her book. "Be careful, Nadine," she warned. "You might break something."

"Dance with me, D.W.," urged the pirouetting Nadine.

"Sorry, but I'm busy," D.W. responded. "At the end of summer I'll start going to Arthur's school, and I want to be prepared for homework and bullies and stuff like that."

"Worry, worry, worry-wart," Nadine mocked her.

"You should be worried too," said D.W. earnestly. "They don't hand out milk and cookies in grade school, you know."

Nadine gasped. A look of terror spread over her face, and she tripped over her petticoat in the middle of a grand jete. Falling forward, she struck a lamp stand and caused it to tip. Pal awoke and perked up his ears as the blue porcelain lamp slid off the stand, plunged to the floor, and broke into several thousand pieces just inches from the frightened dog. Pal yelped and ran into the kitchen, where the mothers of the two girls had heard the smashing noise and were rising to investigate.

D.W. set down her book, leaped from the couch, and came to the side of her horrified friend. "Oh, this is awful!" Nadine lamented. "If my mom finds out I did this, she won't let me visit you anymore!"

"I don't think so," D.W. reassured her. "My mom will just buy a new..."

She and Nadine looked up and saw, to their consternation, Mrs. Read and Mrs. Harris towering over them, looking quite angry. "Explain this," Mrs. Read ordered, pushing aside some of the lamp fragments with her slippered foot.

Nadine thought faster than she ever had in her short life. "It was, uh, Pal," she lied. "He was running around, and he knocked the lamp over. I tried to stop him."

"Is this true, D.W.?" Mrs. Read asked her daughter.

D.W. stuck her hands behind her back and assumed an arrogant tone. "I cannot tell a lie. Nadine did it."

Nadine's jaw dropped. She tried to defend herself, but only small whimpering sounds would come from her mouth.

Mrs. Harris put out her hand. "Come on, Nadine, we're going home," she said sternly.

"B-b-but..." Nadine stammered. She then turned to D.W., her expresssion filled with hurt and anger. "How could you do this to me? I thought you were my friend!"

"Honesty is the best policy," D.W. replied coldly. "Trust me, Nadine, this hurts me more than it hurts you."

Mrs. Harris grabbed Nadine by the arm and began to drag her away. "I hate you, Dora Winifred Read!" the girl cried out. "You're not my friend anymore!" Then the front door closed, and her protests were silenced.

As Mrs. Read sadly picked through the rubble of what had once been a quality porcelain lamp, she turned to D.W. and smiled slightly. "I'm proud of you for telling the truth. But now you've lost a friend."

D.W. climbed onto the couch and picked up her grade school preparatory book. "I still have other friends," she pointed out. "Like Emily, and Vicita, and James, and the Tibbles, and Arthur."

----

Later that evening, Mrs. Prufrock tucked Prunella and Dolly into Prunella's bed. For her first night in the future, Dolly was wearing a pair of yellow, footless pajamas that Muffy had loaned her.

"I'm sorry to make you two share a bed," said Mrs. Prufrock, "but I wouldn't want either of you to ruin your back by sleeping on the couch."

"It's okay, Mom," said Prunella.

"Perfectly all right, Mrs. Prufrock," Dolly added.

"Now go right to sleep," said Mrs. Prufrock as she reached for the light switch. "I don't want to hear any talking."

The light went off, the door closed, and Prunella and Dolly found themselves alone in the dark.

"I think I'll enjoy living in the twenty-first century," said Dolly quietly. "So many things have changed. Boxes with moving pictures...carriages without horses...ships that sail through the sky...the little round candles that one lights with a switch."

"Just wait till you go to school tomorrow," Prunella responded. "Then you'll see all kinds of cool stuff."

"This bed is so soft," Dolly commented. "My old bed was lumpy all the time."

"It's okay," said Prunella glibly.

Dolly fell silent for a few seconds, then sighed. "I miss my mother dreadfully."

Prunella didn't answer, not knowing of anything helpful to say.

"I knew this might happen," Dolly continued. "I knew I might travel so far into the future that I would never see her, or aunt Charity, again. But we all knew that she would likely be hanged soon anyway."

"I'm a descendant of your aunt Charity," said Prunella, "if that counts for anything."

Dolly sighed again, a happier sigh. Several moments passed in silence and darkness.

"Alan is such a smart boy," Dolly spoke up. "And friendly, too. Tell me, does he have a lady love?"

But by that time, Prunella was snoring.

TBC


	9. Yet Another New Girl

The next morning, as Mrs. Read was feeding strained spinach to Kate and D.W. sat on the floor tickling Pal, there came a knock at the door. Mrs. Read rose to answer it, and found Nadine's mother, Mrs. Harris, standing on the doorstep with a large box cradled in her arms.

"I bought you a new lamp to replace the one Nadine broke," she stated as she carted the box through the kitchen.

"Oh, that's very thoughtful of you, Maria," Mrs. Read replied with a smile.

D.W. followed the two women into the living room, curious as to the appearance of the new lamp. "Is it a unicorn lamp?" she inquired.

"No," said Mrs. Harris, who was resting the box on the floor next to the stand of the old lamp. She straightened up and rubbed her lower back with her hands, while Pal carefully followed her wagging tail with his eyes.

"Is it a mermaid lamp?" asked D.W.

"Wrong again," answered Mrs. Harris as she tore open the top flaps of the box. Reaching inside, she exerted herself and pulled out an object that made D.W. gasp in horror...

The lamp was made of porcelain, but had the appearance and shape of Nadine. After Mrs. Harris had placed the Nadine lamp on the stand, she took the power cord, which came out of the end of Nadine's tail, and plugged it into the wall. She then pressed Nadine's nose three times, causing the lamp girl's head to glow bright, brighter, and finally brightest.

"NOOOOO!" shrieked D.W., bolting upright in her bed. Driven by terror, she threw aside the covers, leaped to the floor, and hurried out of her bedroom. Bounding down the stairway two steps at a time, she reached the living room and found to her relief that the lamp stand was still empty.

The bleary-eyed Mrs. Read, wearing hair curlers and a bathrobe, walked into the room behind D.W., clutching a mug of coffee. "What's wrong, dear?"

Then D.W. remembered the events of the previous evening...all of them...

"Mom, I've done a terrible thing!" she cried. "Nadine broke the lamp and I told the truth but I should have blamed it on Pal and now Nadine's in trouble and she's not my friend anymore and it's all my fault!"

Mrs. Read crouched down, placing her coffee mug on the empty stand. "Telling the truth isn't a terrible thing," she reassured her daughter. "It's a very good thing. You should always tell the truth."

"Not when it gets my best friend in trouble!" D.W. retorted.

Mrs. Read grinned condescendingly. "What happened to the little girl who couldn't tell a lie?"

"I don't know, Mom." D.W. reflected on her actions of the previous night, and could make no sense of them. "It's like an alien took over my body and made me do good things."

The pajama-clad Arthur made his way down the stairs, putting his glasses over his beady eyes. "What's all the racket?" he wanted to know.

"Oh, Arthur," said D.W. earnestly, "I take back what I said last night about you being such a nice big brother."

"What did I do wrong this time?" Arthur wondered as he shuffled past the two.

"Mom, what'll I do?" asked the anxious D.W. "I have to go to kindergarten with Nadine, and she'll be mad at me because her mom punished her for breaking your lamp. I bet her tush is all red and swollen from spanking."

"I'm sure she's forgotten about it by now, dear," said Mrs. Read comfortingly.

----

Nadine was coloring within the lines of a crayon drawing she had made, and Emily was watching over her shoulder with interest, when D.W. walked up to the two girls in the kindergarten playroom. "What are you drawing, Nadine?" she asked nervously.

"Oh, hi, D.W." Nadine looked up briefly while Emily snickered. "I'm drawing a picture of you. Wanna see it?"

When D.W. saw the drawing she felt a churning uneasiness in her stomach. "What is it?" she asked.

"Tell her, Emily," said Nadine.

Emily pointed to the figure in the center of the drawing, a crudely drawn cage in which a little girl with aardvark ears stood, clutching the bars and yelling, HELB! HELB! "That's you," she told D.W. The cage was being lowered by a crane, which was operated by a girl who wore a petticoat and had a line sticking out of her back like a tail. "That's Nadine," Emily explained. Below the cage was drawn a wavy surface with what appeared to be tentacles rising from it. D.W. had no trouble guessing what it was, but Emily said it anyway: "That's a tank full of octopusses."

"Eww! Octopusses!" D.W. grimaced in fear and backed away.

"My mom says I can't go to your house again for a whole month," said Nadine bitterly. "But I don't care, 'cause you're not my friend anymore. Emily is my best friend now."

Emily put her arm around Nadine's shoulders and squeezed tightly. "We're staring a new club," she announced. "It's called the D.W. is a Tattletale Club."

"I'm not a tattletale!" D.W. bellowed, clenching her fists.

"Oh, sure, Donkey Warts," Nadine rejoined.

"Disaster Warning," Emily chuckled.

"Duck Waddle," Nadine giggled.

"Dumb Weirdo," Emily added. D.W.'s scowl grew ever darker as the girls taunted her.

"Dim Wit," laughed Nadine.

"Dog Breath," chortled Emily.

"Hey!" Nadine became serious. "Breath doesn't start with W."

And D.W. spent the rest of the day playing with her neighbor, Vicita Molina.

----

"Good heavens, this school is enormous!" The astonished Dolly turned her head in every direction as she and Prunella walked through the center court of Lakewood Elementary. "My school was very small, and had only one room."

"Three hundred and fifty kids go to this school," Prunella told her.

"So many," Dolly marveled. She was wearing yet another one of Muffy's dresses, this one lavender in color, and her long brown hair was tied back with a pink bow.

Shortly Van and Beat approached the two girls, discussing their team science project. "I sent an email to one of the Oxford professors," Beat was saying. "He sent me a link to a website with... Oh, hello, Prunella."

"Beat, Van, this is my new friend, Dolly Proctor," Prunella introduced the girl. "Dolly, these are friends of mine, Beatrice Simon and Van Cooper."

Dolly lifted up the hem of her skirt and bent her knees slightly.

The gesture took Beat off guard. "You curtsied," she observed. "How quaint."

"You speak like an English girl," Dolly pointed out.

"That's because I am an English girl," replied Beat.

"And you..." Dolly gazed at Van's wheelchair in amazement. "A crippled boy in a chair that moves by itself. Is your chair powered by an engine, like the horseless carriages?"

"Horseless..." Van became confused.

"She means cars," Prunella clarified.

"Oh." Van did his best to answer Dolly's puzzling question. "Uh, yeah, it's motorized. It's an okay way to get around, but someday I'm gonna have a robot body like Bionic Bunny."

"Robot? Bionic?" said Dolly in bemusement.

"Van and I have been working on a report about robots," Beat explained. "Robots are what we call machines that can do the work of humans. Some professors at Oxford have invented a robot that can iron clothes. Bionic means that you take a part of your body that doesn't work, and replace it with a machine."

"And Bionic Bunny is a cartoon about a guy who gets hurt in an accident, and they put him back together with robot parts," Van added.

"What's a cartoon?" asked Dolly innocently.

While Van and Beat gave each other stupefied looks, their teacher, Mr. Wald, wandered up to the group. "Good morning, kids," he said with a warm smile.

"Oh, hi, Mr. Wald," Prunella responded. "This is my friend Dolly Proctor. She's staying with us for a while. She's nine years old, so I think she should go to your class, or maybe Miss Ratburn's."

"I'll take it up with the principal," Mr. Wald offered. "Where are you from, Dolly?"

"The village of Davenport, in the colony of New Hampshire," said Dolly proudly.

Mr. Wald scratched his horse-sized chin thoughtfully. "Come with me, Dolly," he requested.

Moments later he led the girl into Mr. Ratburn's office, where the new principal was typing a document on the computer. "We have a new student, Nigel," he announced. "Dolly Proctor. Friend of Prunella Prufrock's. Says she's from the 'colony' of New Hampshire."

Ratburn swiveled in his chair and looked at Dolly with interest. "She looks a lot like Prunella did when she was in my class," he remarked.

"What is that device, sir?" asked Dolly, pointing at the computer.

"You mean the computer?" was Ratburn's reply.

"Computer," Dolly repeated. "It looks like a box with words in it. Is that what you read in place of books in your century?"

Taken aback by Dolly's naivety and strange accent, Mr. Ratburn took several seconds to form a response. "Who are your parents?" he finally asked.

"My mother's name was Hannah Proctor," Dolly answered. "My father's name was Will Carpenter, but he left us. They both died three hundred years ago."

Mr. Wald and Mr. Ratburn exchanged befuddled looks. Then Ratburn glanced at the wall clock and said, "It's almost time for class. I'll call Prunella's parents and try to find out more about Dolly. In the meantime, you can teach her about the wonders of our modern age."

"Television!" exclaimed Dolly, rubbing her hands in expectant glee. "Airplanes! Robots!"

A few minutes later, Dolly stood before Mr. Wald's fourth-grade students with a placid smile on her ratlike face. The teacher had written the name DOLORES PROCTOR on the blackboard before taking a seat behind his desk.

Dolly curtsied again. "My name is Dolores Maria Proctor," she said with aplomb. "You may call me Dolly. I was born in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and fifty-nine."

Arthur, Francine, Binky, Muffy, George, Fern, Van, Beat, and Mavis all burst into laughter. Adil remained silent, having no idea what a "year of our Lord" was.

Mr. Wald waved his hand to silence the class. Dolly, undeterred, went on with her introduction. "I come from the village of Davenport in the colony of New Hampshire. I appeared in your marvelous century yesterday, and have stayed with my good friend Prunella ever since."

"Oh, I get it," Binky interrupted. "Prunella has a little sister she's been hiding from us."

"Do you have magic powers, too?" Arthur asked her.

"Of course, thou silly goose," Dolly replied sharply. "All the women in my family were witches, and they were hanged for it."

Rather than laugh or mock, the students simply stared blankly at Dolly.

Adil shuddered--he had heard stories of witches in his native Turkey. Did such creatures really exist in America?

Beat, for her part, became annoyed that someone had co-opted her catchphrase.

Once Dolly had seated herself at a desk, Mr. Wald stood up. "Let us recite the Pledge of Allegiance," he said formally.

All the kids except for Dolly rose to their feet, and shortly Dolly followed suit. Placing their hands over their hearts, they chanted, "I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America..."

When Dolly heard the opening line of the pledge, she suddenly flew into a panic and grabbed Beat, who stood by the desk to the right, by the shoulders. "No, Beatrice!" she cried urgently. "'Tis treason against the British Crown! Thou shalt be hanged!"

All the kids lowered their hands and gawked at the terrified Dolly.

Beat wrapped her hands around Dolly's wrists and slowly lowered them. "In case you haven't heard," she said with a hint of contempt, "Great Britain and the American States are no longer at war. They are, in fact, allies."

"A-allies?" stammered Dolly in surprise.

"Allies," Beat replied. "Which is what you and I will not be, if you persist in this colonial charade."

As Beat released her wrists, Dolly sank slowly and sheepishly into her desk chair. Mr. Wald reached down and picked up a stick of chalk. "We'll dispense with the pledge today," he announced.

TBC 


	10. When Harry Met Dolly

"This black string," said Dolly, gesturing toward a power cord she had wound into a loop on the floor. "What do you call it?" One end of the cord was attached to a digital piano located in the band room of Lakewood Elementary.  
  
"It's called an electrical cord," Beat replied impatiently. She had gathered with Arthur, Francine, Muffy, Binky, Fern, George, Alan, and Prunella, all of whom had been lured to the scene by Dolly's promise of spectacular feats of magic.  
  
"What does electrical mean?" Dolly asked Beat. She was clutching a silver flute in her hand, an instrument on which she had displayed moderate skill during second-period music class.  
  
"Um, it's a power source," George explained. "When you see a bolt of lightning in the sky, that's electricity going from the clouds to the ground."  
  
"No, it goes from the ground to the clouds," Beat corrected him.  
  
"I understand now," said Dolly. "You harness lightning to power your machines, your lights, even your musical instruments. Amazing."  
  
"Yeah, I suppose it is," said Arthur.  
  
Dolly started to lift the flute to her mouth. "This is a musical spell my mother taught me. The fakirs of India are aware of it, and they use it to control snakes. It's good for much more than snakes, however." Having said that, she began to play a sweet, repetitive, folkish melody. As her fingers ran gracefully along the stops of the flute, the power cord quivered, then the plug began to rise into the air. As the other kids (except for Beat) watched in astonishment, the cord ascended until it was as high as Dolly's head, and then began to undulate back and forth like a serpent mesmerizing its prey.  
  
Beat folded her arms haughtily. "Hocus-pocus humbug," she grumbled. "You've got a magnet hidden in here somewhere."  
  
As Dolly went on playing, and the cord waved back and forth, Mavis Cutler burst into the band room, holding a newspaper section in one hand. "Hey, Binky!" she exclaimed. "I just found something we can use for..." Then she gasped with fright upon seeing the enchanted power cord. "SNAKE!" she shrieked, dropping the newspaper and backing quickly against the wall.  
  
"It's okay, Mavis," Binky told her. "It's just a..."  
  
"Kill it! Don't let it get me!" cried the terrified, panting Mavis.  
  
Dolly pulled the flute from her mouth, and the power cord slowly descended and wrapped itself into a loop as before. "I thought you got over being afraid of snakes," said Binky, who had bent over to pick up Mavis' newspaper.  
  
Still breathing heavily, Mavis hesitantly stepped over to the power cord and probed it with her foot. "Snakes scare me to death," she said weakly. "If I got over it, it must have been during the past year."  
  
After handing the newspaper section back to Mavis, Binky turned to Dolly with a hopeful expression. "Hey, Dolly, maybe you can use your magic powers to help Mavis get her memory back."  
  
"Her memory?" was Dolly's response.  
  
All eyes turned to Mavis. "One day my parents were talking about putting me in a private school," the bespectacled, red-haired hamster girl related. "I went to bed that night, and when I woke up it was a year later. I'd been attending Uppity Downs the whole year, but I couldn't remember any of it."  
  
"Binky just wants you to remember when you kissed him," Fern chimed in.  
  
Arthur turned to Francine. "I still want to read that letter she gave you," he insisted.  
  
"Give it up, Arthur," said Mavis. "She won't even let me read it."  
  
Dolly thought for a few seconds. "I could hypnotize you," she suggested to Mavis.  
  
"Rubella already tried that," Prunella pointed out.  
  
"In that case," said Dolly, "I'm at a loss. I'm dreadfully sorry."  
  
"And you call yourself a witch," said Binky disappointedly. "Come on, Mavis, let's make like a French aristocrat and head off."  
  
Giggling and holding the newspaper under her arm, Mavis followed Binky through the door of the music room. "That was a funny joke," she chuckled. "Where did you hear it?"  
  
"You told it to me, remember?" Binky replied. "Oh, that's right, you don't."  
  
The pair sat down on a bench in the center court, and Mavis opened up her newspaper. She pointed to a headline that read, EXPERIMENTAL CRYSTAL MISSING FROM GOVERNMENT LAB. "Hmm," Binky grunted disinterestedly.  
  
"Scientists at Los Cactos National Laboratory spent ten years creating a new kind of crystal," Mavis summarized. "It had a flexible lattice structure, and they hoped to use it to store energy. But now it's disappeared."  
  
"Why would anybody want a crystal made out of lettuce?" Binky wondered.  
  
"Lattice, not lettuce," Mavis responded. "I'm not sure what a lattice is, but I think it's like a spring. If you take a billion springs and squeeze them at the same time, then you can store a lot of energy. I think the crystal works the same way, only the springs are microscopic."  
  
"Gee, somebody ought to write a science report about it," Binky mused.  
  
As he and Mavis discussed the article, they were approached by Adil Faruk, the Turkish exchange student who had once been Arthur's pen pal. "I am looking for Fern," said the boy in halting English. "Have you seen her?"  
  
"She's in the band room, watching the magic show," Binky told him.  
  
When Adil entered the room, he was greeted by the sight of Dolly with the ends of a flute sticking out of the sides of her head, or so it appeared. The gathered kids (with the exception of the still-skeptical Beat) were applauding wildly at her latest illusion.  
  
"Your magic tricks are pretty cool," Alan complimented her, "but recess is almost over."  
  
"Yeah, it's time for boring old science class," moaned Muffy.  
  
"You've been a wonderful audience," said Dolly, who seemed to be extracting the flute from an invisible hole in her head.  
  
As the kids filed out of the band room, Adil came up to Fern and tried to strike up a conversation. "I have an idea for our science report," he said in a thick accent. "The discovery of water on the planet Mars."  
  
"That's nice," said Fern without smiling or looking at the boy.  
  
Discouraged, Adil said nothing more to Fern until they had reached Mr. Wald's classroom. Fern seated herself at a desk, opened her backpack, and pulled out an Internet magazine and a notebook containing her own partly completed science report.  
  
----  
  
Finally the Lakewood kids were dismissed from school, and went their separate ways to enjoy the mild late-February weather. Alan and Prunella led Dolly to the Sugar Bowl, where a large number of kids were congregated.  
  
"This," said Alan, gesturing grandly, "is the Sugar Bowl. This is where we all hang out after school."  
  
"Hang out?" exclaimed Dolly in alarm. She glanced around the restaurant nervously, as if expecting to see nooses suspended from the rafters.  
  
"That's an expression," Prunella informed her. "To hang out means to spend time together."  
  
The three kids were greeted by Arthur, Francine, Muffy, George, Mavis, and Adil, who had filled up one of the tables. Prunella and Alan picked up three chairs and set them next to the table so that they and Dolly could sit with the others.  
  
"Dolly, your tricks are really amazing," said Francine. "How did you do all that stuff?"  
  
Before Dolly could answer, Muffy interrupted. "That's rude, Francine. You never ask a magician to reveal her secrets."  
  
"As I said before, I'm not a magician," said Dolly wearily. "I'm a witch."  
  
"Witch, magician, what's the difference?"  
  
Dolly waved her hand at Muffy's throat. "I'll show you the difference."  
  
"I wonder where Binky and Fern have..." Muffy began to say, only to clutch her throat in terror when she heard Arthur's voice coming out of her mouth. The other kids laughed uproariously.  
  
"That's cool, Dolly," said Arthur. "Can you make me sound like Muffy?"  
  
Dolly obligingly waved her hand at Arthur as the embarrassed Muffy cleared her throat and found that her voice was returning to normal.  
  
"No ice cream for me today, Mr. Menino," said Arthur in Muffy's voice. "I don't want to spoil my girlish figure." The kids laughed even harder than before, except for Muffy, who scowled indignantly.  
  
"Show me a magician who can do that," Dolly boasted.  
  
"Okay, okay, you're a witch," said Muffy, her voice restored. "Now as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, I wonder where Binky and Fern have disappeared to."  
  
Francine shrugged. "I hardly ever see them after school anymore."  
  
"I think Fern does not like me," said Adil.  
  
"Maybe she's still sore at you for calling her ugly," Arthur theorized.  
  
"I did not call her ugly," Adil replied.  
  
"Well, you said she wasn't beautiful," Arthur rejoined.  
  
"I don't know how girls are in your country," Muffy said to Adil, "but here in America, girls want to be told that they're beautiful."  
  
"Not me," Mavis interjected. "I'd rather be judged for my brains than my looks."  
  
"Can I look at your brains, Mavis?" George requested.  
  
"Eww!" groaned the other kids.  
  
At that moment Mr. Menino, proprietor of the Sugar Bowl, came up to the table and laid an enormous silver bowl in front of George. The bowl contained a fantastic amount of ice cream in all different flavors, with whipped cream, nuts, and three cherries sitting on top of what might as well have been three separate mountain peaks.  
  
The kids' eyes nearly sprang from their sockets at the sight of the gigantic sundae. "What on Earth..." muttered the awestruck Dolly.  
  
"Ladies and gentlemen," said George dramatically, waving a spoon, "I present to you the Harry Mills Gut Buster, the largest sundae in the world."  
  
"Ooohhhh...aaahhh..." marveled the kids.  
  
"Even Buster couldn't eat that much," Alan remarked.  
  
"Are you sure you won't need help with that?" asked Mavis.  
  
"I'll let you know if I do," George answered. "I'll give you hourly updates."  
  
Dolly couldn't take her eyes off the huge pile of dessert. "I've had ice cream before, but it was never like this," she said to George. "May I please have a taste?"  
  
"Sure," George replied.  
  
Picking up a spoon, Dolly carved out a portion of Artichoke Fudge Ripple with a dollop of whipped cream and a few sprinkled nuts, and carefully, almost reverently, placed it in her mouth. Her eyes widened as the sweet, creamy taste overpowered her. "It's...it's...oh, I must have more!"  
  
The kids watched with delighted astonishment as Dolly stuffed spoonful after spoonful of George's sundae into her mouth, gushing ecstatically all the while. "Mmm! Oh, it's heavenly! I've never tasted anything like it! Ooohhh! I can't help myself! Mmm! Ooohhh! More! More!"  
  
Dolly's rapture was also witnessed by Mr. Wald, who had just entered the shop. Turning to Mr. Menino, who stood across the counter, he said, "I'll have what she's having."  
  
TBC 


	11. The Ring of Truth

"Help! Help!" squealed D.W. mockingly. "Vicita, D.W., help us! The wicked witch Galaundriel captured us and put us in her tower and turned us into ugly trolls!"  
  
In D.W.'s room, Vicita sat and watched while D.W. performed a comedy sketch with her toys. She had built a block tower with two troll dolls standing on top, and was bringing two princess dolls mounted on unicorns up to the tower entrance.  
  
"Do not fear!" D.W. cried triumphantly. "I, Princess D.W., and my best friend, Princess Vicita, will rescue you!"  
  
She then provided the raspy voice of one of the trolls. "But how will you get us out? The tower is so tall, and you are so small!"  
  
"Not a problem!" D.W. caused the mounted princesses to charge into the tower wall, knocking it down and reducing the structure to a pile of blocks.  
  
"Hey, you squished us!" complained one of the fallen trolls.  
  
Vicita laughed gleefully. "Oh, D.W., that's so funny!"  
  
Suddenly D.W. heard a noise and turned her head toward the bedroom door. "Someone's coming!"  
  
Vicita gasped with alarm and instantly vanished in a puff of smoke. Through the door charged the real Vicita, wearing a broad smile and clutching a blonde cowgirl doll in each hand. "I brought my dolls," she announced proudly. "Now we can play Gunslinging Girls of the Golden West."  
  
"Saddle up, pardner!" said the excited D.W. As Vicita sat down beside her, they placed the cowgirl dolls atop the unicorns and wiggled them in a slow trot.  
  
"Well, looky there, Vicita," said D.W. in a Texas drawl. "Ah reckon that there's a Wanted poster on that there tree over yonder."  
  
"Well, let's mosey on over and have a look-see," Vicita suggested. The two girls dismounted their dolls. "Well, looky there, D.W. It says on that there Wanted poster, 'Wanted, Dead or Alive, Nasty Nadine and Evil Emily.'"  
  
"Ah reckon it does say that," D.W. concurred. Then the girls used their free hands to pick up the two troll dolls from the wreckage of the block tower.  
  
"Hey, you over yonder! Stick 'em up!" said D.W., wiggling her troll doll. "I'm Nasty Nadine!"  
  
"And I'm Evil Emily!" Vicita added.  
  
"And we're the Gunslinging Girls of the Golden West," said D.W. through her cowgirl doll. "We're the law in these here parts, and you got two choices. You can go to jail alive, or you can go to jail dead."  
  
"We choose dead!" cried Vicita in a troll-like voice.  
  
"Bang, bang!" shouted D.W.  
  
"Bang, bang!" shouted Vicita.  
  
"Ugh, ugh!" grunted D.W.  
  
"Ugh, ugh!" grunted Vicita. The two troll dolls fell over onto the floor, vanquished.  
  
"Good shootin', pardner," D.W. commended Vicita.  
  
The two girls fell silent when they heard the voice of a strange man coming from the living room. "Someone's here," D.W. observed.  
  
After a few seconds of careful listening, she recognized the voice. "It's that wind guy again."  
  
"What wind guy?" asked Vicita, setting down her cowgirl doll.  
  
"He's my dad's old friend," D.W. replied. "His name's Gust Windblow, or something like that. Come on."  
  
The girls sneaked quietly out of the bedroom and along the upstairs hall. From their vantage point they saw Angus Winslow, now dressed in a yellow knit sweater, sitting on the couch below. Arthur sat next to him, and the two seemed to be enjoying a friendly chat.  
  
"Yeah, she was in our class today," Arthur told the man. "She's some kind of magician. She did all kinds of cool tricks."  
  
"What kind of tricks?" asked Winslow with interest.  
  
"She made a power cord wave around like a snake," answered Arthur, his voice tinged with amazement. "She stuck a flute through her head. And when we were at the Sugar Bowl, she changed my voice so I sounded like my friend Muffy."  
  
Winslow scowled slightly. "I think you're exaggerating," he said sternly. "Now tell me about Dolly's tricks again, only this time I want the truth." With that, he started to wave his right hand, jade ring and all, in front of Arthur's face.  
  
D.W. and Vicita watched with surprise as Arthur's eyes glazed over and a vacuous grin spread over his face. "What I told you was the truth," the aardvark boy insisted. "I think she's really a witch, like she says."  
  
A thought suddenly struck D.W. "Stay here," she whispered to Vicita, and then started to amble casually down the stairway, singing, "La de da de da..."  
  
Winslow smiled welcomingly, and Arthur grinned vacuously, as D.W. strolled into the living room, consciously trying to act as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Vicita observed curiously as D.W. stopped in front of Arthur, reached up, pulled his glasses off, breathed on them, and replaced them on his face.  
  
Arthur showed no hint of anger, but simply removed his glasses and started to wipe the fog from them with his shirt. His grin remained vacuous.  
  
"Your feet stink, Arthur," said D.W. innocently as her brother put on his glasses. "And your breath stinks, and your ears stink, and your nose stinks. You stink all over. You're the stinkiest stinker who ever stinked."  
  
"I'm glad you're my sister, D.W.," said Arthur, still grinning (you guessed it) vacuously.  
  
"I don't know how somebody who stinks like you do can have so many girlfriends," D.W. went on. "Francine's your girlfriend, and Muffy's your girlfriend, and Fern's your girlfriend, and Jenna's your girlfriend, and..."  
  
"I only had one girlfriend," said Arthur, grinning (that's right) vacuously. "That was Sue Ellen."  
  
Before D.W. had a chance to hurl more insults, Mr. Winslow interrupted her. "I think you should talk more nicely to your older brother," he said, moving his ring hand in front of D.W.'s face.  
  
But D.W. was ready for him. Quickly wrapping her hands around his jade ring, she began to pull and tug with all her strength. "Ow!" exclaimed Winslow. "What are you..." After about five tugs, D.W. managed to yank the ring from the man's finger.  
  
"Give that back!" Winslow bellowed. He lunged for the ring, but D.W. leaped backwards to avoid his grasp. She then seized the ring with both hands and began to wave it back and forth, its jade end pointed at Winslow. "You are in my poooweeer," she droned hypnotically. "You will be niiiice...you will tell the truuuth..."  
  
"D.W., please give Mr. Winslow his ring back," Arthur asked politely.  
  
Apparently unaffected by D.W.'s spell, Winslow put his long arm forward and plucked the ring from the girl's hands. D.W. fled out of the room and up the stairway as he replaced the ring on his slightly chafed finger. The doorbell rang, but he seemed too aggravated to notice.  
  
"Well?" asked Vicita when D.W. reached her position on the second floor.  
  
"It didn't work," said D.W. gloomily. "It's not magic."  
  
Mr. Winslow's ears (which were unusually long, even for a rabbit person) picked up the sound of Mrs. Read greeting a visitor as he turned to the grinning Arthur and remarked, "Your sister's smarter than she looks."  
  
"She's the best little sister I ever had," said Arthur with a tone of idyllic cheerfulness.  
  
Maria Harris, wearing her best red silk blouse and blue slacks with a hole in the back for her tail, followed Mrs. Read into the living room. "I left Nadine with Emily and Marie-Helen," she related as Mr. Winslow stood up to greet her. "She's still angry with D.W. over the lamp situation."  
  
"Arthur, why don't you go see if Adil needs help with his report?" asked Mrs. Read, who was seating herself across from Mrs. Harris and Mr. Winslow.  
  
"Yes, Mother." Without hesitation, Arthur jumped to his feet and hurried into the guest bedroom, where Adil was laboring tirelessly on a report about water on Mars. His place on the couch was snatched up by Mrs. Harris, who couldn't seem to take her eyes off of the tall, handsome rabbit man seated next to her.  
  
"Dave tells me you're an expert on witches," she said wistfully. "I'm interested in witches as well. I dress Nadine up like a witch every Halloween. I had a great-aunt who claimed she was a witch. When I was a little girl, my favorite book was 'The Witch of Blackbird Pond'."  
  
"Mm-hmm," grunted Winslow.  
  
"So tell me, what interests do you have besides witches?" Mrs. Harris asked him.  
  
"More witches," was his reply.  
  
---  
  
While Mrs. Harris cozied up to Mr. Winslow, Alan and his parents were welcoming a stranger into their home. Dolly was holding a suitcase, which Prunella had packed full of Muffy's clothes, while Alan and Prunella shook hands.  
  
"Now you've got your bed to yourself again," Alan observed.  
  
"Oh, I don't mind sharing it," Prunella responded. "I'm just a little worried about Dolly casting spells in her sleep."  
  
Dolly giggled as Prunella departed through the front door. "The guest bedroom is this way," said Alan, and Dolly followed after him, suitcase in hand.  
  
The two children stepped into the guest room, which featured bare walls, a dingy wooden floor, and a few spots of peeling paint. "I know it's not much to look at," said Alan as Dolly put down her suitcase, "but at least it's warm."  
  
"It will do nicely," said Dolly. "'Tis very kind of you and your parents, Alan."  
  
"My mom will bring in some sheets and blankets in a..." Alan began, but stopped when Dolly suddenly went into a trancelike state. "What is it?"  
  
Dolly didn't answer, but walked forward slowly, her gaze fixed. Alan watched silently as she knelt down, reached underneath the bed, and seemed to wrap her hand around an object. Then she pulled out her arm, rose to her feet, and unclenched her fist. "Good heavens!" she cried ecstatically. "Alan, it's gold!"  
  
At first, Alan thought the shiny object in Dolly's hand might be a discarded piece of chocolate in a golden wrapper. He moved in to take a closer look...and slapped his forehead in dismay.  
  
It was indeed a gold coin. The image of a boy's face was engraven on it, and around it the words, REPUBLIC OF JASON.  
  
"I wonder how that got there," Alan silently asked himself. To Dolly he said aloud, "You...you can sense gold?"  
  
"Any witch worth her salt can sense gold," replied Dolly, still gloating over her find. "It must be worth a pretty penny. I've never heard of the Republic of Jason. Is it over the sea?"  
  
Alan simply groaned.  
  
----  
  
The conversation between Mrs. Read, Mr. Winslow, and Mrs. Harris wound to a close, and soon Winslow was standing by the front door, retrieving his jacket from the coat closet. Mrs. Harris was saying her farewells, while Mrs. Read remained in the living room, knowing well enough to leave the pair alone.  
  
"I can't tell you how happy I am to meet someone like you," Mrs. Harris gushed, her tail wagging vigorously. "It's so hard to make interesting conversation with the men in this neighborhood. All they talk about is work, sports, work, beer, work..."  
  
"And I'm pleased to meet such a fine woman as yourself, Maria," said Winslow, fastening the buttons on his jacket. "I'll be in Elwood until the weekend, so perhaps you and I could meet for dinner."  
  
"Oh, that would be lovely!" Mrs. Harris enthused. "And a movie. I just love movies."  
  
"Dinner and a movie it is, then," declared Winslow. "Friday evening, perhaps?"  
  
"Friday's good," said Mrs. Harris breathlessly.  
  
"Six p.m.," said Winslow, reaching for the doorknob. "I'll meet you here."  
  
"I'll be here." She smiled eagerly as the tall man disappeared through the door.  
  
Soon Winslow was strolling down the sidewalk, breathing in the somewhat nippy February air, and feeling as if all was right in the world. Elwood City was such a contrast to Salem--friendlier people, fewer crowds, a slower pace, drivers who didn't look upon other cars as prey. And maybe the dating pool wasn't as daunting to men as he had been told. But the girl...was she really what she claimed to be? It seemed impossible, but if it was true, then nothing would ever be the same again...  
  
He walked on, carelessly whistling the Dies Irae, unaware that a pair of invisible eyes were carefully observing his every move.  
  
TBC 


	12. Team Trouble Too

Thursday flew by uneventfully. Dolly performed a few more tricks for her new friends, D.W. and Vicita continued to feud with Nadine and Emily, and all the kids in Mr. Wald's class worked furiously on their science reports. When Friday morning arrived, Alan, Prunella, and their classmates were in for a huge and not-so-pleasant surprise.  
  
She was a six-foot-tall, youngish, slender moose woman with curly blond hair that hung around her antlers like pasta. She wore a stylish green dress with a matching belt around the middle, and a pair of black high-heeled shoes. She was definitely not Mr. Baker. Although she looked like a person who had every reason to be happy, she was scowling slightly, as if she would rather be anywhere than in front of a room full of fifth-graders. On the blackboard next to her was written the name, MRS. KRANTZ.  
  
"I'll start with the roll call," she said in a voice that seemed affected and bored at the same time. "Maxwell Thomas Alwyn."  
  
"Here," said Max, a dog boy who wore a bicycle helmet.  
  
"Okaaay. Bonnie Josephine Chandler."  
  
"Here," said Bonnie, a blond elephant girl.  
  
Mrs. Krantz said "okaaay" after calling each name, as if it were a necessary incantation to prevent the pupils from suddenly vanishing. After she had finished calling the roll and led the kids in a snail-paced recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, she picked up a piece of chalk and set about to teach. "Today's lesson is on adverbs, okaaay?" She spoke slowly, as if fearing that the students might not be quick enough to catch all her words. "Can anybody give me an example of an adverb?"  
  
Alan immediately raised his hand. "Certainly," he replied.  
  
The moose woman stared at him, apparently expecting to hear more.  
  
"Certainly is an adverb," Alan added, lowering his hand.  
  
After spending a moment or two lost in thought, Mrs. Krantz frowned at Alan disapprovingly. "Oh, a smart aleck. What's your name, young man?"  
  
"Alan Powers, ma'am," was Alan's polite reply. "Where's Mr. Baker?"  
  
The new teacher took a step towards Alan. "Ralph Baker no longer teaches at this school," she answered in a piercing falsetto voice. "Shame on the man, teaching children to believe in unicorns and space aliens and other such nonsense, when he should be teaching them the basics--reading, writing, and...and that other thing that starts with R. Okaaay."  
  
As first period lumbered on, Alan increasingly saw, and felt, the indignant stares of the other kids. He could tell that he had become the second least popular person in the room.  
  
----  
  
In Mr. Wald's room, his fourth-graders were presenting summaries of their science reports. Mavis stood beaming at the front of the classroom, Binky at her side, telling the fascinating story of a new energy storage technology.  
  
"The scientists at Los Cactos say the new crystal battery should hold fifty times as much power as any previous type of battery," she related. "They say everybody will soon be driving electric cars powered by crystals."  
  
Arthur raised his hand. "Did they ever find out who stole the crystal from the lab?"  
  
"No, they didn't," Mavis replied. "It's really weird. They say somebody got past the motion sensors and turned off the security cameras."  
  
"Whoa," marveled George. "To do that, you'd have to be, like, invisible."  
  
"Hey, Dolly," said Francine to the rat girl seated next to her, "can you turn invisible?"  
  
"I didn't do it," Dolly answered without turning her face.  
  
"Thank you very much, Mavis and Binky," said Mr. Wald, and the two kids returned to their desks. "Fern, Adil, you're up."  
  
Adil and Fern rose to their feet, walked to the front of the room, and turned to face the other pupils.  
  
"Our report is about..." they said in unison, then stared at each other in surprise.  
  
They remained stunned and speechless for a number of seconds, and then Mr. Wald spoke up. "The cameras are rolling, kids. Say something."  
  
Fern could only stammer. "Y-you wrote a report too?" she asked Adil.  
  
"Yes," answered the perplexed Adil. "Now we have two reports."  
  
Mr. Wald grew suspicious. "I thought I made it clear that you were supposed to work on the report as a team," he said with firmness.  
  
Alarmed, Fern tried to defend herself. "I...I'm sorry, Mr. Wald, but...well, Adil's new to the country, and his English isn't very good, so...so I decided to write the report myself."  
  
"I see," said Mr. Wald, drumming his fingers. "Did you even bother to ask for Adil's help?"  
  
Fern lowered her face in shame. "No, sir."  
  
"Fern would not talk to me," Adil chimed in. "She was angry with me. I did not know that she would write a report, so I wrote one."  
  
"Is that true, Fern?" asked the teacher.  
  
"Yes, sir," Fern mumbled.  
  
Mr. Wald reached for the red pen lying on his desk. "Lack of teamwork, failure to communicate," he said analytically, as if diagnosing a disease. "Twenty- five percent off your final score."  
  
"WHAT?" Fern became so outraged that her ears stood on end. "But I worked on my report day and night! I worked on it during recess and lunch hour! I even worked on it at the TV studio!"  
  
Her hand shot over her mouth when she realized what she had just revealed. A breathless silence fell over the entire class.  
  
Beat spoke up. "What were you doing at the TV studio?"  
  
"Yeah," Muffy added. "Were you in a TV show, or something?"  
  
Grinding his teeth nervously, Binky glanced around at the other kids. They knew that he and Fern had been disappearing immediately after school for some time now. In a matter of seconds they would guess Fern's secret...and his own would be exposed as a natural consequence...  
  
His only chance was to distract attention from himself. "Hey, I know," he said with a huge grin, and then started to sing, "Mary Moo Cow, Mary Moo Cow..."  
  
"Shut up, Binky!" Fern snapped. "I'm only the voice! I don't dance around in a cow costume, like you do!"  
  
Binky suddenly felt as if he had just gone seventeen rounds with Slam Wilson while being forced to wear a dress. All eyes turned to him in amazement, and it seemed to him as though they were boring through his skull with laser beams. He didn't know what to do. And when Binky Barnes didn't know what to do, he threatened people.  
  
Shaking a fist, he growled, "The first person to breathe a word of this to anyone gets a free clobbering, compliments of me." All the seated kids fell silent and looked toward the front of the room...  
  
...just in time to witness the final embarrassment. The contrite Adil placed his hands on Fern's trembling shoulders and said to her, "Fern, I do not want you to be angry. Fern, you are beautiful."  
  
Paroxysms of laughter erupted throughout the room. Fern, blushing with shame and anger, marched back to her desk, sat down, and placed her head in her hands.  
  
Once the laughter subsided, Adil turned to the class and announced calmly, "My report is about the discovery of water on the planet Mars."  
  
----  
  
The welcome tolling of the end-of-period bell finally arrived. "I'll see you in history class, okaaay?" Mrs. Krantz droned as the relieved fifth-graders hurried from the room to enjoy a few minutes of respite.  
  
"Man, she is, like, the dorkiest teacher ever," Max complained to Lucy de los Santos, the Latina monkey girl.  
  
"You are, like, so right," replied Lucy in her helium voice. "Like, what did I do in a past life to deserve her?"  
  
Alan followed the pair out of the classroom, while Floyd Walton, a cat boy, and Patty Duff, an aardvark girl with glasses, took up his rear. "Nice going, Brain," said Patty with a bitter tone. "You got Mr. Baker fired. Now look what we're stuck with."  
  
Surprised, Alan turned to face her. "What do you mean, I got him fired?"  
  
"Everybody knows it was you who complained about him to Mr. Ratburn," Floyd interjected. "At least he was interesting. Mrs. Krantz is the All-Powerful Queen of Boring."  
  
"Okaaay?" Patty squealed sarcastically.  
  
"Argh!" Prunella rushed by them, clutching her ears. "Make her stop! I do believe in unicorns! I do! I do!"  
  
As Alan stepped aside to evade the accusing glares of Patty and Floyd, he bumped into Marina, knocking her cane from her hand. Apologizing profusely, he crouched down to pick up the cane and return it, only to find that Marina had also bent over. They laid their hands on the cane at about the same instant.  
  
"Oh," said Alan meekly. "I guess you didn't need my help after all."  
  
"That's okay," said Marina. When she was standing again, she shook her head in wonderment. "This new teacher is awful, Alan. It's like listening to an out-of-tune orchestra. For once in my life I wish I was deaf as well as blind."  
  
"I'd better ask Mr. Ratburn what happened," said Alan, walking alongside the rabbit girl. "I can't believe he'd fire Mr. Baker because of something I said. There he is now."  
  
Upon seeing Mr. Ratburn next to the principal's office, Alan took his leave of Marina and walked hurriedly along the hallway. Bonnie, who had caught up with Prunella, watched him as he began to talk with the interim principal. "I'll bet he's thanking him for getting rid of Mr. Baker," she remarked. "He was The Rat's star pupil last year. He has iiiinfluence."  
  
"He looks more like he's begging for Mr. Baker to come back," was Prunella's reply.  
  
In front of his office, Principal Ratburn was explaining his actions to Alan. "You're not the only student who complained about Mr. Baker's theories," he informed the boy. "The school board was already considering taking action against him. All they needed was a little nudge."  
  
"But I'd rather have him than Mrs. Krantz," Alan pleaded. "Her voice is like fingernails scratching a blackboard."  
  
"It always takes a day or two to get used to a new teacher," said Ratburn. "Now run along. I have some cheaters to deal with."  
  
Exasperated, Alan slowly shuffled away. Fern and Binky walked past him, muttering and scowling at each other.  
  
Van buzzed up alongside Fern in his motorized wheelchair. "Fern, it's so cool that you're in the Mary Moo Cow show," he commended the girl. "But why did you keep it a secret?"  
  
"Oh, I don't know," said Fern glibly. "I guess I was afraid of being laughed at."  
  
"I would never laugh at you, Fern," Van reassured her. He then accelerated his chair until he was rolling along next to Binky. "Hey, Binky," he started to say, but lost his composure and began to laugh riotously and involuntarily.  
  
Binky lowered his head and groaned.  
  
TBC 


	13. Adil Gets It

The news about Binky and Fern spread rapidly through the school. While Fern's ego swelled ever larger as her friends and many kids she didn't know congratulated her on winning the Mini Moo voice role, Binky became the butt of one awful cow joke after another. By the time morning recess arrived, he was considering spending the rest of the day with a paper bag over his head. Not that it would do any good, as he was one of the biggest kids in the school. 

A group of third-graders were laughing and mooing at him near the playground; he couldn't find it within him to clobber them, as they well knew. He rounded a corner of the school building to get away from them, only to run into the two people he least wanted to see under the circumstances...Molly and Rattles.

"Well, well," gloated Rattles with a sinister smirk. "If it isn't Binky 'Barn', the Dancing Cow."

"Got milk?" added Molly with an evil chuckle.

"You don't understand, guys," said Binky nervously.

"What don't we understand?" asked Molly, shrugging. "You dance around in a cow suit on TV. Seems pretty clear to me. What about you, Rattles?"

"Huh?" the boy grunted.

"Um...uh...you just don't understand." The sad-faced Binky tried to walk past his two friends, but they blocked his way.

"We've been keeping something from you, too," said Rattles in a menacing tone. "We're really cattle rustlers."

"And I see a big fat cow who could use a little rustling," Molly quipped. She and Rattles then pulled their hands from behind their backs, revealing that they were both carrying jump ropes.

Binky wasn't sure what "rustling" meant, but it sounded a lot like "wrestling", and he didn't relish the prospect of going toe-to-toe with two big kids armed with ropes. So he did the smartest thing he knew how. He turned and fled in terror.

The kids in the playground were treated to the bizarre sight of Molly and Rattles waving jump-rope lassoes over their heads and chasing Binky in circles around the swingset and jungle gym. "Get along, little dogie!" taunted Rattles as he and Molly slowly but surely gained ground on the frightened Binky.

When Acting Principal Ratburn arrived on the scene, he saw Binky lying on his stomach, while Molly pulled up on his arms and Rattles tied the helpless boy's hands and feet together with a jump rope. "We're gonna have hamburger tonight," Molly exulted.

But Mr. Ratburn had other ideas. "Miss McDonald, Mr. Ratola..." he intoned after clearing his throat.

"Hey, you're not the principal," Rattles protested.

"Yes, he is," Molly informed him. "Mr. Haney's sick. Don't you ever pay attention in class?"

"Once you're finished untying Mr. Barnes, I'd like to see the two of you in my office," Ratburn ordered.

"Yeah, yeah, we know the drill," groused Rattles as he untied the rope to set Binky free.

While Binky was recovering from the ordeal of being hogtied, Francine was leading Dolly to an outside corner of the school building where she usually shared secrets with her friends (she had never trusted the girls' room since the incident with Rattles' listening device). When they arrived and Francine had looked around to make sure they were alone, she started to confide her feelings.

"I believe you when you say you're a witch, Dolly," Francine half-whispered. "I've been...I mean, Sue Ellen's been all over the world, and she's met people who said they were witches, and they could do some pretty amazing things, but you've got them beat."

While Dolly wondered whether to take this as a compliment, Francine went on. "I'd like to ask you to do something for me, Dolly. You see, I'm in love with a boy, but he doesn't love me back."

Dolly thought for a second, then grinned deviously. "Oh, I understand. You want me to put a love spell on him."

"Um, basically, yes," said Francine hesitantly.

"I knew it wouldn't be long before someone came to me with such a request," said Dolly. "My mother taught me how to make a powerful love potion, but she told me to use it very carefully. Some people become angry and hurt when they realize that someone used magic to make them fall in love. On the other hand, some people stay in love after the potion wears off. It's impossible to predict."

"Will you do it?" Francine asked pleadingly.

"That depends," Dolly answered. "First of all, who's the boy?"

Francine glanced around furtively to see if anyone was listening, and then whispered, "Arthur."

"Hmm." Dolly's eyes widened with interest. "Has he a lady love? I mean, a girlfriend?"

"No," replied Francine. "I...don't think he's interested in girls yet."

"Well, the potion would certainly fix that," said Dolly confidently. "But the effects only last for a day. After that, he may love you, or hate you, or his feelings may not change at all."

"If he only loves me for a day, that's better than nothing," said Francine, looking at the ground.

Dolly turned as if to walk away, saying, "I'll think about it."

Francine grabbed her before she could leave. "One more question. Can you make a potion that will cure love? Because if I can't have a potion to make Arthur love me, then I want one that will make me forget my love for him."

Her request seemed to alarm Dolly, who didn't reply.

"Oh, don't tell me," said Francine, suddenly looking disappointed. "That would only last a day, too."

"I'm afraid so," Dolly admitted. "I'll make the love potion, Francine, but I'll need some ingredients. Is there a market nearby that sells eye of newt?"

----

The kids in Miss Cosma's kindergarten class were also enjoying playtime. The teacher had provided them with miniature pairs of scissors, and they were cutting patterns out of folded paper. D.W. was proudly holding up the paper doll chain she had created for Vicita and Dallin to see, when Nadine strolled over, clutching scissors and a paper snowflake of her own manufacture.

"Oh, that's pretty, D.W.," she said with barely concealed malice. "Too bad your dolls have to split up now."

"Huh?" Before D.W. could figure out what she meant, Nadine raised her scissors and cut in half one of the dolls in her chain, leaving her with three and a half dolls in one hand and two and a half in the other.

Now angry, D.W. threw down her ruined doll chain, grabbed the pair of scissors that Dallin was holding, and began to chase after the fleeing Nadine. "I'll get you, Nadine!" she bellowed. "I'll cut off all your hair!"

Miss Cosma witnessed the altercation between the girls, and quickly placed herself between them. "No fighting with scissors!" she barked. "Time outs for both of you!"

The antagonistic girls dropped their scissors and stormed away, D.W. into one corner and Nadine into another. Miss Cosma folded her arms and cleared her throat. "In the SAME corner," she commanded.

D.W. and Nadine turned and glowered at each other. Neither was willing to move to the other's corner. "Both of you, to the center of the wall," Miss Cosma ordered, walking towards them.

When the two girls had reached the middle of the wall, they turned their backs to each other and stared bitterly into space. Miss Cosma bent over and addressed them. "Why are you two fighting all the time? You used to be best friends."

"She started it," D.W. grumbled. "She cut my paper doll."

"You started it first," Nadine retorted. "You drew a funny face on my fish painting."

"You started it before I did," D.W. countered. "You made fun of my initials."

"I did not, Dirt Wad!" snapped Nadine.

"Did too!"

"Did not!" Somehow the girls managed to carry on an argument without turning to face each other.

"Cut it out, girls," the teacher admonished them. "Nadine, it's not nice to call people names."

"But, Miss Cosma," Nadine protested, "I only made fun of D.W.'s name because she..."

"Because she what?"

Nadine put a finger on her chin and thought for a moment. Then she looked up and said, "I don't remember. But it was really bad."

Miss Cosma turned to face D.W., who shrugged. "Don't look at me."

----

The school day didn't improve for Binky, who was about to put his lunch down at a table where Arthur, Francine, George, and Muffy were seated, only to see the four kids place their outstretched fingers on their temples and say, "Mooooo."

Binky sighed and carried his lunch tray to another table. While watching him leave, Muffy remarked to the others, "He wouldn't sit with us. How rude."

The unhappy bulldog boy eventually found his way to a table where Fern and Adil were sitting and eating across from each other. "Hi, guys," he greeted them, forcing a smile.

"Hey, Binky," said Fern. "Go ahead, sit with us. We won't make fun of you."

As the gratified Binky seated himself next to Fern, he grinned and said, "Fern, you are beautiful."

"Oh, cut it out," Fern grumbled.

The exchange between Fern and Binky confused Adil. "Binky said you are beautiful," he said to Fern. "Why are you angry?"

"Because..." Fern strained her brain to think of the reason, but gave up in frustration. "Oh, I don't know."

"I was only kidding," said Binky as he took a bite of meat loaf.

"So you think Fern is not beautiful?" Adil asked him. Binky nearly spit out his mouthful of meat loaf.

Fern struggled to come up with a way to explain the situation to the odd-mannered Turkish boy. "It's like this, Adil," she began. "In America, when a girl wants to be called beautiful, she puts on a pretty dress, and lipstick, and makeup, and all that. If a girl comes to class looking the same way she looks every day, then you don't have to call her beautiful. But you should never tell a girl she isn't beautiful. That hurts her feelings."

"Unless she's so ugly that people are getting sick just from looking at her," Binky joked. Fern gave him a quick elbow jab in the side.

Adil appeared to be deep in thought. "If a girl wears a pretty dress, lipstick, and makeup, then I should call her beautiful," he muttered to himself. "If she does not wear a pretty dress, lipstick, and makeup, then I should not call her beautiful. But I should never tell her that she is not beautiful."

"I think he's got it," said Binky elatedly.

"By George, he's got it!" said Fern in triumph.

Adil lowered his face. "It is hard to remember everything that I should do," he lamented.

"You think you have it hard," said Fern, smirking. "Try being a girl."

TBC


	14. The Second Coming of Sue Ellen

"Well, it looks like the school day is over," squawked Mrs. Krantz as she glanced up at the wall clock for the fiftieth time during the lesson. "You survived your first day with me. You kids have a fun weekend, okaaay?"  
  
But the miserable fifth-graders knew that the weekend would be anything but fun, with the spectre of Monday and more tiresome lectures by Mrs. Krantz looming over them. Could things possibly get worse?  
  
They could. Alan took advantage of the few remaining seconds to ask a question. "Mrs. Krantz, aren't you going to assign us any homework for the weekend?"  
  
It was the first time they had seen the moose woman smile. "Very well." The kids almost expected her to start cackling. "If it's homework you want, it's homework you'll get. I want each and every one of you to write a three-page report on a health food of your choice, and bring it to me on Monday, okaaay?"  
  
The bell rang, the students rose wearily from their desks, and Alan could tell from the tension in the air that most of them were about ready to take whatever they could get into their hands and club him to death.  
  
"Two words," the spiky-haired Lucy said to him as she walked by. "Brain...dead."  
  
Alan shuffled slowly and sadly from the classroom, while Prunella walked closely behind to shelter him from any hurled projectiles. Floyd strolled past him, grumbling, "Health food? Was that your idea?" Max shook a fist at him, threatening, "Dude, you're gonna need health food when I'm done with you." And Bonnie treated him to the eminently intelligent remark, "You are, like, just as much a dork as she is. And that's, like, really dorky."  
  
"Don't listen to them, Alan," Prunella urged her friend.  
  
"Listen to who?" was Alan's glum response.  
  
As they were passing through the school's front exit, they were suddenly met by the polar bear boy Harold Farmer, who went by his Kipling-inspired middle name, Mowgli. To their surprise, the usually shy and quiet boy spoke to them boldly.  
  
"They have no right to talk to you like that," he stated. "It's not all your fault Mr. Baker was fired. I complained about him, too."  
  
Alan was startled. "You...you did?"  
  
"You bet I did." Mowgli sounded more confident than ever as he bounded down the stairway. "I go to school to get an education, not to hear stories about space aliens and unicorns."  
  
"So what's your opinion of Mrs. Krantz?" Prunella asked him.  
  
"It's her first day," Mowgli answered. "She'll get better."  
  
The three fifth-graders ambled down the sidewalk past Fern, who had just reacted in shock to something Binky had said to her.  
  
"QUIT?" she roared. "You can't quit! We're in the middle of taping an episode!"  
  
"I can't do this anymore," said the distraught-looking Binky. "All the kids are making fun of me. It's torture."  
  
"So?" replied the indignant Fern. "Just ignore them!"  
  
"I can't," Binky moaned. "I'm at that stage of life where my happiness depends on what other people think of me."  
  
"I don't believe this!" Fern's face was red with outrage. "You're Binky Barnes! You're the terror of the playground! Why should you care what they think? If they laugh at you for dressing up like a cow, just clobber them!"  
  
Binky sighed. "It's no use, Fern. Everybody knows I'm just a big dumb coward who's afraid to sleep without a night light."  
  
"Talk to Mrs. Stiles," Fern urged him, grabbing him by the hand. "Maybe she can help you."  
  
"Forget it." Binky yanked his hand away from Fern and began to trudge down the street away from her.  
  
"BINKY!" Fern shrieked desperately, and a car alarm went off in the distance.  
  
Van, his wheelchair parked at the curb, wondered what Fern was screaming about but didn't get a chance to ask her, as the Buick driven by his sister Quinn had arrived to take him home.  
  
As Odette helped him into the back seat and folded up his chair, he noticed that someone was sitting in the front of the car opposite Quinn. Someone with cat ears and curly orange hair tied into puffs in the back.  
  
A moment later Odette squeezed into the back seat next to Van, and let her swan neck slowly straighten out until her head bumped against the roof. "Van, I'd like you to meet April Murphy," she announced. "She's the new girl in my class. April, this is Van, my brother."  
  
The girl with cat ears turned her head and smiled pleasantly at Van.  
  
The duck boy's eyes bulged. He couldn't believe what he was seeing.  
  
"Hi, Van," said April Murphy.  
  
She was clearly the same age as Odette, probably twelve. Yet everything about her appearance--her face, her hair, her ears--unmistakably identified her as Van's former classmate, Sue Ellen Armstrong.  
  
"Um...uh..." Van stammered helplessly.  
  
"Don't worry," said the cat girl. "I won't eat you."  
  
"Uh, hi, Sue...er, April," Van managed to get out. Even the shaded areas on her face matched Sue Ellen's. Who was she? A lost sister? A clone?  
  
As the Buick rolled down the street, Van became more acquainted with Odette's new friend. "That's what I thought when I first saw her," Odette recounted. "Of course, I only met Sue Ellen a few times."  
  
"You look so much like her," Van told April. "You've got to be related somehow."  
  
"I don't have any relatives named Armstrong," the girl replied.  
  
"I told April about your jazz quartet, Van," said Odette as the Buick came to a stop in the Cooper driveway.  
  
"I love jazz," said April wistfully. "I can play sax and drums."  
  
"That's funny," Van remarked as Odette lifted him into his wheelchair. "There's a girl in our quartet--well, it's more of a trio now--but there's a girl who also plays sax and drums."  
  
April suddenly gasped, and Van couldn't tell if the girl was frightened or delighted. Now that she was out of the car, Van could see that she was wearing a green blouse and skirt, much like Sue Ellen had customarily worn.  
  
"Something wrong?" he asked April.  
  
"Uh, no, nothing," she replied, although it was obvious she had experienced a powerful emotion. "I...just don't meet many people who can play both sax and drums."  
  
"Hey, we could use a new member," Van said to her. "Why don't you try out?"  
  
"I can't now," April replied as she started up the access ramp to the front door of the Cooper house. "I'm too busy with school."  
  
Even the way she talked was the same, Van thought. The slight accent brought about by years of traveling around the world, mixing with non-native English speakers of every nationality. But this girl was at least three years older than Sue Ellen. They couldn't be the same person...  
  
TBC  
  
----  
  
Author's Note: If you're still reading by this point, you're probably asking yourself a few questions:  
  
1. Are April and Sue Ellen one and the same? The answer will be revealed before long.  
  
2. Just who is Angus Winslow, and what's up with his magic ring that makes people tell the truth? Is he good or evil? I promise to keep you guessing until the very end of the story.  
  
3. When do we get some action? Where's the "force of evil" that Alan told Buster about in the flash-forward chapter? Bear with me a little longer, my friends.  
  
4. What does the Los Cactos crystal have to do with all of this? Obviously something, or I wouldn't have bothered to mention it.  
  
Happy reading! 


	15. Mateless in Manhattan

"She looks just like Sue Ellen, except she's twelve," Van informed his friends Arthur, Francine, and Alan, who were gathered at Arthur's house. Francine was seated behind her drum set, Alan held a cello between his legs, and Arthur occupied the piano bench. "She says she can play drums and sax." 

"Just like me," remarked Francine.

"I asked her if she would come over," said Van, "but she said she's too busy with school."

"But she just got here," Alan observed. "How can she be busy with school already?"

"If she's anything like you, Alan," Arthur joked, "then she's probably finishing her homework from her old school."

"We could really use someone like that," said Francine disappointedly.

"I've been looking all over for a new member," Van told the trio. "I even put up fliers in other schools. I guess there's not much interest in jazz nowadays. We'll just have to wait until Fern gets tired of playing a cow."

As the kids discussed their musical future, Mrs. Read walked in through the front door, holding a blue porcelain lamp in her hands. D.W., who was reading a picture book at the kitchen table, saw the new lamp and was intrigued by it. It looked almost identical to the one Nadine had accidentally...yes, that was it...

She rushed into the living room while her mother was carefully setting the lamp on the empty stand. "Mom, I remember now!" she exclaimed proudly. "Nadine was dancing, and she knocked over the lamp and broke it, and it scared Pal, and he ran away, and Nadine tried to blame it on Pal, but I told the truth, and now we're enemies."

Arthur looked up from his sheet music, astonished. "She did what?"

"She was dancing," answered D.W., "and she knocked over the lamp and broke it, and..."

Outrage filled Arthur's voice as he stood up from the bench. "She tried to blame it on Pal? But Pal hasn't broken anything in years!"

"He broke stuff when you first got him," said D.W. Next to her, Mrs. Read had finished inserting a new lightbulb and was plugging the power cord into the wall.

"But he knows better now," Arthur insisted. "If you hadn't told the truth, Pal would've been punished. He would've had to stay outside for a week."

"So?" D.W. shrugged. "He's just a dog."

"To you, maybe," said Arthur, gesturing toward the door. "Come on. We're going to Nadine's, and you're gonna tell her that she was wrong to try to frame Pal for breaking the lamp."

"But she doesn't want to talk to me," D.W. protested. "She hates me."

Exasperated, Arthur turned to his friends Van, Francine, and Alan, who seemed eager to start practicing. "I'll be right back, guys," he told them.

With that, Arthur pulled open the front door, and found to his surprise that Nadine's mother, Maria Harris, was coming down the sidewalk in a green sequined knee-length dress and high-heeled shoes. Her bleach-blond hair was attractively molded, and her cheeks were painted with a rosy pastel hue.

"Hello, Arthur," said the dolled-up Maria as she stepped into the Read house. The first thing she noticed was the new lamp that Mrs. Read had just turned on. "Oh, Jane, you shouldn't have. How much was it? I'll repay you."

"That won't be necessary, Maria," Mrs. Read replied.

At that moment Adil happened to emerge from the guest bedroom, clutching a book about the solar system in his hands. He became fascinated with the attractive squirrel woman who stood in the living room, admiring the newly acquired lamp. Without hesitation, he walked up to her and proclaimed, "You are beautiful."

Maria chuckled. "Why, thank you, Adil."

Immensely pleased with himself, the Turkish boy disappeared once again into the guest bedroom.

"So it's time for your date with Angus already," said Mrs. Read idly.

"Yes, and it's so exciting!" Maria rubbed her hands together gleefully.

Arthur got up the courage to tap on Maria's satin-clad arm, and to his suprise, the fabric didn't break when he touched it. "Where's Nadine?" he asked.

"She's at Emily's."

Armed with this information, Arthur started to march toward the door. Then he stopped and turned to D.W., who had returned to her picture book. "Hey, D.W., how do I get to Emily's house?"

D.W. gave him directions to Emily's, and he exited through the front door with a look of determination on his face. _The poor boy_, thought D.W. as she watched him go. _Emily and Nadine will eat him alive._

Five more minutes passed, and the doorbell rang. Maria hastened breathlessly to the door and opened it, revealing the presence of Angus Winslow, dressed in a navy blue suit jacket and well-polished black shoes. "Oh, come in, Angus!" she gushed, and the well-combed rabbit man ducked his head slightly and stepped through the doorway.

"You're a lovely sight to look at," he complimented Maria.

The woman blushed, though it wasn't visible through her pink pastel makeup. "Thank you, Angus," she half-giggled.

"Have a good time," Mrs. Read called after them as they departed, arm in arm.

The sun was beginning to disappear behind the western hills as Winslow led his date toward the sidewalk. "Which movie did you decide on?" he asked.

"'Mateless in Manhattan'," replied Maria enthusiastically.

"Oh, lovely," said Winslow as he cringed within.

He held open the passenger door of his old, dented Pontiac for Maria to enter. "What a nice car," she remarked as her wagging tail beat against the frame and the door.

"It gets me from here to there," said Winslow. "When I first came here I saw Ed Crosswire about getting a replacement for it, but I'm not sure if I can trust him."

As he strapped himself into the driver's seat, turned on the creaky engine, and drove away, two pairs of eyes watched him and Maria from behind a nearby bush.

Arthur waited until the car was out of sight before he said, "She's gone." Then he and Nadine left the concealment of the bush and started quickly toward Arthur's house.

D.W., from her seat at the kitchen table, watched the door open and Arthur and Nadine come through. "Nadine?" she gasped. "You're not supposed to..."

"I'm sorry, D.W.," said Nadine, her expression one of sincere contriteness. "I shouldn't have blamed Pal for breaking the lamp. I should have told the truth."

Surprised at Nadine's unexpected apology, D.W. jumped down from her chair.

"I'm sorry for all the mean things I did to you," Nadine went on. "Can we be friends again?"

As she pondered Nadine's request, D.W.'s mind wandered back to the many good times and adventures the two girls had enjoyed together. She thought of the day she had first met Nadine at kindergarten, and the shock she had felt upon seeing a girl who was identical to her one-time imaginary friend. She recalled the danger Nadine had faced, traveling into another dimension to save Marina from the clutches of the evil Pickles. She remembered...well, you get the idea.

Stretching out her arms, D.W. exclaimed, "I'm sorry too, Nadine. Yes, we can be friends again."

The girls embraced each other, giggling with elation. "My work here is done," said Arthur, who then wandered off to practice jazz with his impatient friends.

----

"Do you, John Muzak, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, for richer or poorer, for better or for worse?"

"I do," replied the tuxedo-clad groom with the handsome face and perfectly coiffed hair.

"Do you, Minnie Passenger, take this man to be..."

"Wait," interrupted the rather plain-looking woman in the wedding gown. Turning to the groom, she said with no small amount of hesitation, "John, I...I have a confession to make. I'm just a supporting character."

John's mouth fell open, and he began to stutter. "But...but..."

"The woman you're supposed to be with is stuck in traffic on Fifth Avenue," Minnie told him as she removed the veil from her head and started to back away.

"Minnie, wait!" cried John, reaching toward her. "What about you?"

"My feelings don't matter," said Minnie sadly. "I'm just a supporting character."

Seated in the fifth row of the theater, Mr. Winslow glanced at Maria and saw a look of ecstasy on her face. He could sense that her tail was wagging wildly underneath her seat. For the next five minutes, he struggled not to retch as John Muzak, still wearing his tuxedo, raced down Fifth Avenue in New York City, checking taxi after taxi in search of his true soulmate.

TBC


	16. Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

The next day was Saturday, and Dolly spent much of the day in Prunella's kitchen preparing the love potion she had promised Francine. In addition, she accompanied Rubella to some of the specialty stores she frequented, in search of whatever necessary ingredients Mrs. Prufrock didn't have on hand. She told no one what she was concocting. 

"Double, double, toil and trouble," intoned Dolly as she stirred the boiling mixture in the saucepan with a wooden spoon. "Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog..."

Lured by Dolly's strange incantation, Prunella wandered into the kitchen, clutching an opened history book. "Did you really put a dog's tongue in there?" she asked the witch girl. The fumes from the saucepan carried an indescribable aroma that seemed bitter one moment and sweet the next.

"No, silly," Dolly replied. "It's just a meaningless witch rhyme. I believe Shakespeare borrowed it once."

Having said that, she turned off the element, removed the wooden spoon, and rinsed it in the sink until all traces of the dark brown solution were gone. Then she moved the pan onto another element and placed a lid over it. "Now it needs to cool down for about two hours until it reaches maximum potency," she told Prunella.

"When are you going to tell me what it is?" asked Prunella as she curiously reached toward the covered saucepan, only to receive a mild slap on the wrist from Dolly.

"If you insist on knowing, I'll tell you," said Dolly, who had picked up a pen and a recipe card. "'Tis a potion to cure love." She wrote the words WARNING: DO NOT EAT on the index card, and fastened it to the saucepan lid with a bit of Scotch tape. "If you're in love with a lad, one taste of this will cause you to forget him."

"Who is it for?" Prunella inquired.

Dolly glanced around and made a sad face. "It's for me."

Prunella gasped. "Why?"

"I'm so dreadfully in love with Alan," said Dolly, her voice filled with insincere emotion. "I think of him night and day. But he is of the present time, and I am from the past. Alas, we two can never be."

"That's not true!" exclaimed Prunella with sudden indignation. "What difference does it make if you're from different time periods? Have you told Alan how you feel about him?"

Dolly shook her head gloomily.

"I think you should at least talk to him before you do something you'll regret," Prunella insisted. "Maybe he likes you too. You don't know."

"I dare not," said Dolly, turning away. "'Tis the only way, Prunella."

Crestfallen and speechless, Dolly made her way to the front door of the house, opened it, and stepped through. Once she closed the door after her, she looked back and grinned deviously.

In the kitchen, Prunella wondered why Dolly had chosen to leave so abruptly. Then another thought struck her...

For nearly two years she had pined for the handsome, muscular Binky Barnes, but never once had he returned her affections. The boy was simply too dumb to acknowledge her existence. Not a day had gone by when she hadn't thought of him or longed for him; on more than one occasion she had cried herself to sleep over her unrequited crush. There on the stove, in a saucepan with a crudely written warning label, was a cure for her suffering...

She couldn't lose this chance. Grabbing a spoon and a plastic zipper bag, she pulled the lid from the saucepan, used the spoon to skim a little of the chocolate-like substance from the top, dumped the amount she had culled into the plastic bag, carefully smoothed over the indentation she had left, replaced the saucepan lid, closed the plastic bag, and completely rinsed the spoon. Dolly would be none the wiser.

When she got to her room, she set the bag down on her desk and seated herself on the bed. For roughly ten minutes she held her chin in her hands and stared at her ill-gotten morsel of magic potion. Was she ready to take the risk? What if Binky wised up the next day and realized who truly loved him? What if the potion would cause her to never love again?

As she pondered her options, the telephone rang. "Prunie, it's for you," called Rubella from the first floor.

She hurried to the phone on the outside chance that it might be Binky, calling her back from the edge of the abyss. "Hello?"

"Hi, Prunella, it's Fern." Another disappointment.

"What's up, Fern?" said Prunella, trying to sound cheerful.

"Some of us are getting together at Binky's tonight for a party," Fern informed her.

"Is it his birthday?" asked Prunella, suddenly embarrassed that she was in love with the boy but didn't remember his birthday.

"No, it's not a birthday party," Fern answered. "It's more of a Make Binky Feel Better So He Won't Quit Playing Mini Moo party. It's at six."

"Sure, I'll come." _The love-curing potion should be cool enough by that time_, Prunella thought.

----

Almost two hours later, Dolly returned to the Prufrock house to check on the condition of her potion. She was surprised to see Angus Winslow seated on a living room chair, conversing with Mrs. Prufrock, who wore a floral dress and her usual bead bracelets.

"Maria has taken quite a liking to me," Winslow related. "And she's a very attractive woman, despite the fact that her taste in cinema leaves much to be desired. It's unfortunate that I'll probably never see her again, unless my business brings me back to this neighborhood."

"I'm terribly sorry about what happened to the locket," said Mrs. Prufrock.

"Yes, it's a terrible loss to history," Winslow lamented. When his sensitive rabbit ears picked up the sound of Dolly puttering in the kitchen, he excused himself.

The girl was running her finger over the solidified mixture at the bottom of the saucepan when Winslow approached her from behind. "Well, hello, Dolly," he said in a friendly voice.

Dolly whirled. "Oh, Mr. Winslow! You startled me."

The next sight she beheld was Winslow's jade ring, waving back and forth in front of her face. She felt an odd but peaceful sensation, as if all desire to lie or do mischief had been purged from her soul like a sickness.

"I want to ask you a few questions," said Winslow firmly, "and I expect you to answer truthfully."

"Yes, sir," replied Dolly with an eager smile.

"What's your name?" was Winslow's first question.

"Dolores Maria Proctor, sir," came Dolly's reply.

"What was your mother's name?"

"Hannah Proctor, sir."

"What year were you born?"

"The year of our Lord sixteen hundred and fifty-nine."

"Tell me, how are you able to perform such impressive magic tricks?"

"I've a special sense, sir," Dolly answered innocently. "All of us witches have it. It allows us to see the magical qualities of things."

"Do only women have this sense?"

"I've never known a man to have it, sir."

Winslow glanced over at the saucepan on the stove. "You've been preparing some kind of potion. What is it for?"

"'Tis a love potion," Dolly replied, still grinning as if unaware that she was betraying a confidence. "A friend asked me to make it. One taste of it, and you'll fall madly in love with the first woman you see."

"Indeed." Winslow narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. "Dolly, you've been a very good girl. I have no more questions."

"Thank you, sir." Cheerful as ever, Dolly placed the lid on the saucepan and scampered from the kitchen. Winslow watched with interest as the girl hurried through the front door, as if going to play.

"A love potion," he muttered under his breath.

Then he opened the silverware drawer, and pulled out a spoon...

----

Maria Harris was potting a new fern, and Nadine was eating wafer cookies while watching TV, when the doorbell rang. Maria answered it, and to her delight, found Mr. Winslow standing on the threshold. "Hello, Maria," he said formally.

"Angus!" exclaimed the excited Maria. "Please come in!"

Once he had stepped inside and Maria had closed the door behind him, Winslow announced, "I'd like a moment alone with you."

It sounded serious. Maria immediately walked over to the TV set and hit the power button, turning it off. "Awww," Nadine groaned, climbing down from the couch and shuffling to her bedroom.

When Nadine had closed her door, Maria turned breathlessly to Winslow, anxious to hear what he had to share. To her surprise, the rabbit man pulled a wadded plastic bag from his suit pocket, plucked out a small chocolate-colored object, and tossed it into his mouth. He chewed for a second or two. Maria gazed at him impatiently, unsure what to make of this gesture.

Winslow couldn't believe what was happening. In an instant, Maria Harris had metamorphosed into the most ravishingly beautiful creature on the planet. His heart overflowed with irresistible desire. Dolly's other tricks might have been clever illusions, but this...this was real...

Overpowered by romantic urges, Winslow swept Maria into his arms and began to kiss her passionately.

TBC


	17. If Chocolate Be the Food of Love

_Here goes nothing_, thought Prunella as she closed her eyes, put her fingers over her nose, and popped the little ball of what she thought was anti-love potion into her mouth. As she ran her tongue over it, she realized that it didn't taste unpleasant; removing her fingers from her nose, she guessed that Dolly must have added cocoa powder and sugar to make the stuff go down more easily. 

She swallowed. Already she was beginning to feel a strange intoxication. Her affection for Binky faded from her mind, replaced by indifference. "It's working," she marveled.

Inside Binky's house, a number of his friends had gathered to play games and attempt to dissuade the boy from giving up his role on New Moo Revue. They included Arthur, Francine, George, Muffy, Fern, Van, and Beat.

"The kids won't stop making fun of you just because you quit the show," said Fern, who was sitting in a chair opposite Binky.

"They will sooner or later," replied Binky from his seat on the couch. "But if I stay in the show, they'll make fun of me forever."

"You need to show them you're not afraid of them," said George, who was seated next to his bully-turned-buddy Binky.

"How do I do that?" Binky wondered.

As George opened his mouth to answer, the doorbell rang. "I'll get it," offered Arthur, who was in the chair closest to the front door.

(Author's note: You all know what's coming next.)

When Arthur opened the door, he saw a familiar face. "Oh, hi, Prunella."

What Prunella saw stunned her beyond belief. Standing before her was the most intensely gorgeous aardvark boy--no, boy of_any_ species--she had ever laid eyes on. As her brain clouded over, it dawned upon her that Dolly hadn't told her the full truth about the potion.

"Ar...thur..." she mumbled deliriously.

Arthur swore he could see Prunella's pupils dilating. Before he knew what was happening, Prunella's arms were wrapped around him, and she was kissing every part of his face, including his lips and glasses.

"Stop it!" cried Arthur, lashing out frantically but failing to push the older girl away.

"Arthur, I love you...ooohhh, I love you..." Prunella gushed. The other kids watched in amazement, wondering whether the rat girl's feelings were genuine or it was all a joke.

Finally Arthur managed to twist free of Prunella's grip. "Stop kissing me!" he commanded in a shrill, panicked voice. Prunella lunged at him again, but he took refuge behind a coffee table.

It appeared to him that Prunella's eyes were filling with tears. "You...you don't love me," she moaned as streams of salt water appeared on her cheeks.

Then a brilliant idea occurred to her love-fogged mind. Wiping her tears, she turned and raced through the still-opened front door.

Hardly able to see through the saliva on his glasses, Arthur fumbled his way to the door, closed it, and fastened the deadbolt. Francine came up behind him, looking a bit concerned. "What was that all about?" she asked.

"Uh, I don't know," said Arthur, wiping his glasses on his sweater. "But it was kinda scary."

About ten minutes passed, as each of the kids in turn urged Binky to reconsider his decision. "You don't have to react to them," Muffy told him. "Just ignore them."

"You don't know what it feels like, Muffy," Binky replied. "Nobody ever makes fun of you."

"Of course not," said Muffy arrogantly. "My manners are impeccable, and my clothes are always in fashion."

The doorbell rang again, and Arthur rose to answer it. This time he peered through the peephole, only to find to his chagrin that Prunella was standing on the top of the access ramp with a tray of hors-d'oeuvres in her hands.

Arthur turned to the others. "It's her again," he announced darkly. "This time she's got food."

Beat jumped to her feet. "Let me open the door," she proposed. "I don't think she'll try to kiss me."

Arthur stood aside as the rabbit-aardvark girl pulled open the door, allowing Prunella to step inside. "Oh, that looks scrumptious," Beat commented in her refined British accent.

"They're crackers with chocolate-hazelnut spread," Prunella informed her. "I'd like Arthur to...no, wait!"

But she spoke too late, as Beat had already grabbed one of the chocolate- frosted crackers and taken a bite out of it. The other kids (with the exception of Van) had risen from their seats, and were starting to surround Prunella and her tray of goodies.

"Hey, those do look tasty," Binky remarked.

"Do they have sugar?" Van wanted to know. "I can't have sugar."

What happened next, happened very quickly...

Beat gazed into Arthur's glasses and felt an overwhelming attraction. The boy stepped backwards nervously as she advanced toward him, her mouth agape, her eyes bulging.

Binky and George were helping themselves to the snacks when Muffy said to them, "I'm sure they're delicious, but I'm watching my weight." Suddenly the Muffy they knew disappeared, replaced by a glorious angel of light...

Prunella became speechless and desperate as she watched her friends partake freely of the potion-laced treats, but her mood turned to fury when she saw Beat wrap her arms around Arthur's neck and plant a wet kiss on his quivering lips. Quickly setting the tray on the kitchen counter, she grabbed Beat by the shoulder and yanked her away from Arthur, shrieking, "Get your hands off him!"

Muffy wasn't sure what to make of Binky and George, who were staring at her as if under a hypnotic spell. "Muffy, I love you," mumbled George, stepping cautiously toward her. "Muffy, I want to kiss you..."

Then Binky stuck out a huge fist to block George's way. "Hey, nobody kisses Muffy but me!" he bellowed threateningly.

Muffy started to whimper in fear. Beat shook a finger at Prunella, yelling, "Arthur is_my_ boyfriend, you git!" Francine and Fern watched in astonishment, certain that a fight would break out any moment, and idly plucked crackers from the tray.

Van rolled his chair up to Fern. "Hey, I don't think you should eat that stuff," he warned, but too late...the girls were already chewing.

Fern turned to Van as if to ask, "Why not?", but instead of Van, she saw a being of infinite beauty sitting in a wheelchair. She bent over and reached for him...

Francine was about to look at Van as well...when she suddenly realized what the duck boy meant. She knew what was happening...she was the cause of it, and she had already fallen victim to it...

Placing her hands over her eyes, she began to mutter single-mindedly, "I mustn't look at a boy...I mustn't look at a boy..."

"I'm warning you, Beat!" Prunella growled, clenching her fists. "I'm bigger than you!"

"You may be bigger, but I'm..."--Beat raised a foot and sent it crashing down on Prunella's, causing her to howl in pain--"...smarter!"

"Back off, shrimp!" Binky shoved George with all his might, sending the moose boy into an out-of-control plunge toward the carpet. Bruised but undaunted, George jumped to his feet and glowered at Binky as he tried to think of a way to rescue his beloved Muffy from the clutches of the much-larger boy.

"Unhand me, you brute!" Muffy roared at the lovesick Binky as he tried to pull her closer. Then George was reminded of a cartoon he had seen once...and he knew exactly what to do.

As Arthur fled through the front door from the girls who were disputing over him, and Francine pushed her way past Binky and Muffy with her eyes still covered, and Fern sat on the lap of the perplexed Van, passionately kissing his beak...

...George reached for the tray on the kitchen counter and stuffed all of the remaining crackers into his mouth. He chewed and chewed, and then began to snort. Steam appeared to shoot from his nostrils as he pawed the carpet with his shoe.

Binky, who had almost succeeded in pressing his lips against the unwilling Muffy's, looked over at George...and became afraid. The young moose seemed to have expanded to twice his original size.

As Binky drew his hands away from Muffy in hopes of defending himself, George charged.

His antlers smashed into Binky's solar plexus with awesome force, sending his rival hurtling against the wall and sprawling to the floor.

Binky lay on his stomach, groaning with pain. Beat and Prunella stopped fighting long enough to notice Arthur's absence, and hurried through the door after him. They were followed by Francine, who still held her hand over her eyes and muttered, "Mustn't look at a boy..." Van politely asked Fern to cease kissing him and depart from his lap, but the poodle girl only sighed ecstatically and started to lick his cheek.

And George received an unexpected reward. "My hero!" cried Muffy, throwing her arms around him and kissing him gratefully on the lips. He was in heaven.

Half a block away, Alan strolled casually down the sidewalk, accompanied by the blissfully grinning Dolly. "I don't know what to say to him," Alan admitted. "If I were him, I wouldn't have taken the job in the first place."

"I think wearing a costume and entertaining children is a noble profession," Dolly remarked, her grin unbroken. "He should be proud."

To their surprise, Arthur came running toward them, screaming in terror. They barely had a chance to step to one side as he whipped past them. "I wonder what scared him," said Alan curiously, and then Beat and Prunella nearly plowed into him and Dolly as they ran by in hot pursuit.

"Arthur, come back!" Prunella called out.

"Arthur, I love you!" Beat shouted sweetly.

"So that's what scared him," quipped Alan, glancing over his shoulder.

Then he looked ahead again...and all he saw was Francine, hand over eyes, rocketing toward him like a rogue missile.

WHAM!

Dolly's grin faded slightly as she gazed down at the two kids who had collided with each other and landed on their backs. As Alan slowly pulled himself up and brushed the dust from his shirt, Francine shot to her feet and glared angrily at him. "Why don't you watch where you're going, you..."

"...boy..."

Alan watched in befuddlement as the girl's expression rapidly changed from annoyance to fascination. From Francine's perspective, Alan was growing more handsome with each passing moment, and she knew all was lost. Her only hope was to attempt to explain the situation before her brain melted.

"Don'teatthechocolateDollyputalovepotioninit!" she managed to blurt out before she was seized upon by an uncontrollable urge to throw herself into the arms of the gorgeous hunk of boy standing before her.

Dolly looked on as Francine repeatedly kissed the alarmed Alan, and her grin slowly vanished. "Oh, dear," she muttered in an embarrassed tone. "I've made a serious mistake."

TBC


	18. Rat Fight

Alan managed to fend off Francine's amorous advances long enough to ask Dolly a question. "Is it true? Did you make a love potion?"  
  
"I cannot tell a lie," Dolly answered. "Francine asked me to make a potion that would make Arthur fall in love with her. So I did, but now it seems to have been misused."  
  
"I love you, Alan," gushed Francine as the boy continued to push her away. "You're so handsome and smart. Why won't you kiss me?" Not far away, Van rolled down the access ramp in front of Binky's house, with Fern still in his lap, hugging him tightly.  
  
"Snap out of it!" exclaimed Alan, grabbing Francine by the shoulders. "You're under the influence of a love potion! You're supposed to be in love with Arthur!"  
  
"Arthur who?" asked Francine as she squeezed through Alan's outstretched arms and planted a kiss on his nose.  
  
Unable to bear any more, Alan gave Francine a firm slap across the face. The lovestruck girl backed away, and tears started to form in her eyes.  
  
"I don't love you!" Alan snapped at her. As Francine burst into tears and ran away, Van approached Alan, who grabbed the infatuated Fern around the waist and tugged on her to extricate her from the wheelchair.  
  
"I think that was not a wise thing to do," Dolly said to Alan. "Francine's likely to do something desperate now, like jump off a cliff."  
  
Alan seemed not to hear her as he struggled to restrain Fern from climbing back into Van's lap. "Why's everybody acting so weird?" the duck boy asked Alan. "What did Prunella put in those snacks?"  
  
"So it was Prunella who swiped my love potion," Dolly observed, but without the slightest hint of anger.  
  
Alan moved in front of Van's wheelchair, blocking Fern's attempt to embrace the boy. "Was anybody else affected?" he asked Van.  
  
"Binky and George are fighting over Muffy," came the reply. "Someone needs to go in there and split them up before they kill each other."  
  
"I'll handle it," said Alan. "Dolly, go find Prunella and try to get some answers from her. After that, you can start working on an antidote. There is an antidote, right?"  
  
"No," Dolly replied, "but the effects wear off in a day."  
  
Dolly began to run down the street in the direction of Arthur's house, while Alan made his way into Binky's house in hopes of stopping his feud with George. With him out of the way, Fern hopped into Van's lap and started to kiss the exasperated boy again.  
  
When Alan arrived inside, he found George and Muffy on the couch, snuggling and kissing; Binky was nowhere to be seen. "Where's Binky?" he asked.  
  
Muffy came up for breath and answered. "He's in his room. His mom's chewing him out. You should have seen it, Alan. Binky started to get fresh with me, and George came to my rescue. He was so brave." Then she kissed the moose boy again.  
  
"Did Dolly's love potion affect you, too?" Alan asked her.  
  
"A...a love potion?" Muffy pushed George's arms away and stood up, looking horrified. "Is that why the boys started fighting over me? It had nothing to do with my beauty and charm? Why, that's utterly vomitrocious!"  
  
Scowling, Muffy marched out of the room and through the front door. "Muffy, come back!" George called out, and hurried after her.  
  
At roughly the same time, the frightened, panting Arthur rushed into his house, closed the door, turned the deadbolt, fastened the chain, and leaned with his back against the door for good measure.  
  
D.W. and Nadine were holding a conversation in the living room when he entered. "I think my mom's gonna marry Mr. Winslow," said Nadine. "He's so tall, I bet if I rode on his shoulders, I could see the whole city."  
  
"Oh, look, there's Arthur," noticed D.W. "I think somebody's chasing him."  
  
The girls jumped off the couch and met with Arthur in the kitchen. "Whatever you do," he ordered them, "don't open that door." With that, he started toward the back door to lock it as well.  
  
When he had done so, he wiped his brow with relief. But this proved to be short-lived, as the first things he saw when he turned around were D.W. and Nadine standing on a chair next to the front door...and Beat and Prunella bursting through it.  
  
"AAAAARRRGGGHHH!" cried Arthur.  
  
"Kiss me, Arthur!" Prunella pleaded, her arms outstretched.  
  
"Don't kiss her, kiss me!" Beat insisted.  
  
"Cool! Arthur has TWO girlfriends!" remarked D.W. with delight as she and Nadine watched Prunella and Beat wrap their arms around Arthur and kiss both sides of his face.  
  
But three's a crowd, as they say, and friction quickly redeveloped between the two girls. "Get your own boyfriend!" Prunella growled between kisses. "Arthur's mine!"  
  
"He's mine," Beat retorted angrily, "and I'll fight you for him!"  
  
"Have it your way!" Prunella, confident of an easy victory over the younger girl, stepped away from Arthur and raised her fists. Beat did the same, and her expression showed no sign of fear. As D.W. and Nadine hurried into the living room to witness what they thought might turn into an entertaining slugfest, Mrs. Read came up the laundry room stairway with a basket of clean clothes in her arms.  
  
"What's going on here?" she asked when she saw Prunella and Beat dancing around each other in hostile poses. Arthur stood by silently, thinking that if one girl eliminated the other, he would have a better chance of escape.  
  
"They're fighting to see who gets to be Arthur's girlfriend," D.W. told her.  
  
"Not if I can help it," said Mrs. Read, setting down her laundry basket.  
  
But she was too late...the fight had already commenced. Prunella launched three well-aimed punches at Beat's face, but the rabbit-aardvark girl blocked them each time. Surprised but not discouraged, Prunella attempted a right hook...only to suddenly find herself flying through the air.  
  
With a fierce scream, Beat grabbed Prunella's right arm in mid-punch, yanked it toward her, and flipped the rat girl over her shoulder. There was an earthshaking thud as Prunella's shoulder blades and posterior collided with the floor. Mrs. Read rushed to her aid as she lay on her back, moaning.  
  
"Wow," said the amazed Arthur. "How did you..." Before he could finish, Beat grabbed him around the neck and pulled him in for another kiss. He had no idea how the girl had become so adept at self-defense, but it was clear to him that resistance was useless.  
  
As Mrs. Read helped the shaken Prunella onto the couch, there came a knock at the door, which was still hanging open. Dolly Proctor stood on the doorstep, too polite to enter the house without being welcomed. "Come in," called Mrs. Read, assuming she was another of Arthur's friends.  
  
"Hey, Arthur, here comes girlfriend number three," quipped D.W.  
  
"I'm not Arthur's girlfriend," said Dolly as she walked toward the spot where Beat held the boy firmly in her affectionate clutches. "I am, however, responsible for what has happened here." She noticed Prunella sprawled on the couch, apparently in a bit of pain. "Are you well, Prunella?"  
  
"I will be," Prunella mumbled.  
  
"Why did you steal my love potion?" asked Dolly, looking up and down over Prunella's prostrate body as if estimating the cost of repairs.  
  
"I wanted to cure my love for Binky," Prunella replied as she lifted herself painfully into a sitting position. "Why did you lie to me?"  
  
"If I'd told you the truth," Dolly answered, "you would have used it to make Binky fall in love with you."  
  
"You've got a point there," said Prunella thoughtfully.  
  
Then Beat stopped kissing Arthur and turned her face to Dolly. "A love potion," she grumbled indignantly. "You used a love potion on me!"  
  
"I'm dreadfully sorry," said Dolly, lowering her face.  
  
Beat closed her eyes, and for several seconds appeared to be in intense concentration. She pulled her arms away from Arthur, clenched her fists, gritted her teeth, and started to breathe heavily. Her breath became heavier and heavier, and Arthur, D.W., Nadine, Prunella, and Mrs. Read feared that she would shortly fell Dolly with a lethal karate punch.  
  
Instead, she turned and ran quickly out of the room, up the stairs, and into the second-floor bathroom, slamming the door shut behind her. The others could still hear her heavy breathing.  
  
Arthur began to wipe the moisture from his face with his fingers. "I thought she'd never stop," he said with a relieved sigh.  
  
"So did I!" exclaimed Prunella, and before Arthur knew what hit him, she had encircled him in her arms and started to kiss him again. To Arthur's elation his mother intervened, grabbing Prunella by the arms and dragging her back to the couch.  
  
"No more kissing, Prunella," said Mrs. Read, taking a seat next to the girl. "Arthur's not in a romantic mood right now."  
  
"Awww," groaned Prunella. "Can't I kiss him just one more time?"  
  
Suddenly Arthur heard staccato cries of pain from upstairs. Thinking Beat might have suffered some misfortune, he bolted up the stairway and opened the bathroom door. A blast of cold water vapor greeted his face.  
  
All along the floor were littered articles of Beat's clothing--her dress, her shoes, her underwear. Beat herself was standing in the bathtub, shower water pouring over her stark naked body.  
  
"Argh!" she cried in embarrassment, sticking her hands in front of her legs.  
  
Arthur closed the door so quickly that he almost caught his head in it. The terror filling his stomach was so intense, he feared he would throw up. He had never seen one of the girls in his class naked before. He felt as if he had lost his innocence. Of one thing he was certain--he would never forget the image, however long he might live.  
  
He was still breathless from shock when he reached the bottom of the stairway. "Is anything wrong with Beat?" his mother asked.  
  
"Sh-she's taking a c-cold sh-shower," Arthur stuttered. His head seemed to quiver oddly as he spoke.  
  
Their next visitor was Alan. After charging through the doorway, he closed the door and fastened the locks and chains, glancing about warily. Walking up to Arthur, he noticed the boy's pallid expression and said, "What's wrong? You look like you just saw a naked girl."  
  
Then they heard pounding on the door, and Francine's eager voice coming from outside. "Please, Alan! Give me just one kiss!"  
  
D.W. and Nadine started toward the door as if to climb onto the chair and unlock it, but Arthur and Alan stepped in front of them, blocking their way.  
  
A moment later Beat came down the stairway, dripping wet and with a towel wrapped around her midsection. Ignoring the others, she gave Dolly a scowl that could have killed a small animal. Arthur hid behind a wall, not wanting to see or be seen by her.  
  
"I have never been so humiliated!" Beat roared at Dolly. None of them had ever seen the British girl in such a fit of pique before. "What gives you the right to make me fall in love with someone?"  
  
"The potion will wear off in a day," said Dolly calmly.  
  
"Then that's how long you have to get out of town," Beat warned her.  
  
"Alan, I love you!" came Francine's voice from the other side of the front door.  
  
"Why haven't your parents come for you yet?" growled Beat, taking a menacing step toward Dolly. "Did they get tired of your tricks? Did they abandon you?"  
  
"I told you, my parents are dead." Dolly's expression was one of sympathy, not fear.  
  
"You'll be dead too, once we get over your love spell," Beat threatened. "We'll give you a death befitting a witch. What will it be, Dolly? Hanging? Drowning? Burning at the stake?" Her furious words seemed to have no effect on Dolly's placid exterior.  
  
"Beat, stop talking like that," said Mrs. Read sharply.  
  
Beat's demeanor became calm, and she tightened the towel around her waist. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Read," she said meekly, "but filling my mind with anger and saying hateful things is helping me not to think about...Ar...thur..."  
  
Her eyes started to glaze over, and she looked in all directions in hopes of locating the boy she was compelled to love. Failing at that, she shook her head vigorously, let out an annoyed groan, and rushed up the stairway and into the bathroom.  
  
TBC 


	19. Winslow's People

When Van arrived at his house with Fern still snuggling in his lap, most of his siblings were present. Dallin was playing a video game on the TV, Logan was cutting holes in a new pair of jeans, and Odette was playing a game of go with her new classmate and friend, April Murphy--and losing badly.  
  
"You can't move there," April informed Odette, who was trying to place one of her white stones on a square. "That's a ko position. If that were a legal move, the game could go on forever."  
  
Everyone jumped up when they saw Van and Fern wheel into the living room. They couldn't believe what they saw. Odette was the first to state the obvious: "Omigosh, Van's got a girlfriend!"  
  
"Ewww, they're kissing!" said Dallin, grimacing. While he was distracted, his game character was blown to bits.  
  
"Dude, you never kissed Muffy," Logan pointed out.  
  
"I'm not kissing Fern either," said Van, stopping his chair in the middle of the room with the poodle girl's arms clinging to his neck. "She's kissing me."  
  
Mrs. Cooper, Van's mother, came in from the study to see what the commotion was about. She gasped when she saw a girl sitting in Van's lap and kissing him on the cheek. "She followed me home, Mom," Van told her. "I think she's a stray."  
  
"Break it up, you two," said Mrs. Cooper sternly. "I don't allow puppy love in this house." Her admonition only caused Fern to smile blissfully and tighten her grip on Van's neck.  
  
"I'll break them up," offered April, rising from her chair. When she had reached the spot where Fern and Van were sitting, Fern bolted out of Van's wheelchair and stared at her in disbelief.  
  
"What...? Sue Ellen?"  
  
April waited patiently while Fern's expression predictably changed to one of disappointment. "I get that a lot," she said, grinning.  
  
"I'm sorry." Fern sounded slightly embarrassed. "I thought you were someone else." She then bent her knees as if to sit on Van's lap again, only to fall on her rear end with a surprised cry--for Van had taken advantage of the mistaken identity to spin his chair around and speed into his room, closing the door behind him. Dallin, Logan, and Odette laughed riotously at the sight.  
  
April, who was a full two heads taller than Fern, stuck out a hand to help the girl to her feet. Once she was standing, Fern hurried to the door of Van's bedroom and tried to turn the doorknob, only to find it locked. She yanked repeatedly and forcefully on the knob, crying, "Van, please let me in! I love you!"  
  
"Go home, Fern," ordered Mrs. Cooper, towering over her and pointing toward the front door. Fern was defiant at first, but the duck woman's imposing glare eventually convinced her that she couldn't win. She turned and walked slowly toward the door, a look of utter devastation on her face.  
  
Once Fern had left the house, Mrs. Cooper knocked on Van's door and said loudly, "You can come out now. She's gone."  
  
The door to Van's room swung open, and the boy zipped out in his chair. "Thanks a lot, Mom," he said with relief. "I didn't have it in me to tell her to stop kissing me."  
  
"Kids these days," Mrs. Cooper muttered self-righteously. "Nine years old, and they think they know what love is."  
  
"It's not her fault, Mom," Van responded. "She got hit with the love potion."  
  
"Love potion?" His mother narrowed her eyes suspiciously.  
  
"We were all at Binky's house, when Prunella brought some snacks," Van explained. "Everybody who ate one fell in love. Pretty soon they were fighting and chasing each other around. I think she got the potion from Dolly, the new girl who says she's a witch."  
  
A sudden feeling of paranoid protectiveness found its way into Mrs. Cooper's heart. "Inside," she ordered Van, gesturing toward his room.  
  
She closed the door and sat down on the edge of Van's bed, and her son wheeled about to face her. "Tell me more about Dolly," she requested.  
  
"She started coming to my class this week," Van related in an excited voice. "She can do all kinds of cool magic tricks. She says she's a witch from the seventeenth century, and Prunella and Alan brought her here."  
  
"Hmm." Mrs. Cooper's concern grew. "I might have expected Prunella to be mixed up in something like this, but Alan too? That's a surprise. Tell me about this love potion."  
  
"I don't know much about it," said Van. "I didn't eat the snacks because I thought they had sugar. Fern ate one, and then she looked at me and got a weird look on her face and jumped into my lap and started kissing me. I guess if you eat one and you're a girl, you fall in love with the first boy you look at." He noticed that his mother was staring into space, clearly deep in thought. "Mom?"  
  
Mrs. Cooper lowered her eyes to connect with Van's. "It sounds like Dolly is involved in some pretty serious witchcraft. I've heard of witches at school before. Some people have been badly hurt, or even killed, by them."  
  
Van's beak started to fall open.  
  
"There are evil spirits in the world, Van," Mrs. Cooper continued. "I haven't seen them, but I've seen what they can do. Today it's a love potion, but tomorrow it may be a hex, or a curse, or even a demonic possession. I think you'd better stay away from Dolly until she gives up her witchcraft."  
  
His mouth agape, Van couldn't think of anything to say. What if his mother was right?  
  
----  
  
Sunday morning arrived, and the kids were still dealing with the effects of Dolly's potion. In Beat's apartment, the girl was enjoying a rapturously romantic dream in which she and Arthur were eighteen years old and engaged to be married. They walked down the aisle, Arthur in a tuxedo, Beat in a lovely chiffon gown, as the live band played Mendelssohn's Wedding March.  
  
"Do you, Beatrice Margaret Simon..." intoned Reverend Fulsome behind the pulpit. Beat thought it odd that she was in a church wedding despite the fact that she had never gone to church before, but she didn't care as long as she could be with her beloved Arthur. "...for richer or poorer, for better or for worse?"  
  
"I do! I do!" exclaimed Beat, sitting up in her bed. Startled to find that she was in her own bedroom instead of a brightly decorated chapel, she folded her arms and scowled. "Bloody love potion," she muttered angrily.  
  
In his kitchen, Alan was sitting at the breakfast table in his blue pajamas, eating oatmeal with brown sugar. The telephone rang, and his mother, who was reading the newspaper next to him, rose to answer it. "Alan, it's Francine," she notified her son. "She says if you don't kiss her, she'll jump off the highest building in Elwood City."  
  
"Jumping off the Sage Street Bridge would be much more romantic," said Alan wearily. "Tell her that."  
  
Dolly emerged yawning and stretching from the guest bedroom, clad in a light red nightgown. "Good morning, Dolly," Mrs. Powers greeted her as she shuffled into the kitchen.  
  
"The morning will be better than the rest of the day, at least," mourned Dolly, taking a seat across from Alan. "I fear I shall be roasted at the stake by nightfall."  
  
"I still think this is all an early April Fool's joke," said Alan between shovelfuls of oatmeal.  
  
"No breakfast for me today, Mrs. Powers," said Dolly. "I must locate Mr. Winslow as quickly as possible. I have many things to ask him."  
  
"I don't know where he is," said Alan's mother, picking up the newspaper again. "Arthur's parents would probably know."  
  
Angus Winslow happened to be in Maria Harris' living room at that moment, nestling the ecstatically happy squirrel woman in his long arms. They were engrossed in a romantic comedy video from Maria's extensive collection, entitled "How to Get a Guy Back in 10 Days".  
  
"I've never truly appreciated romantic movies until now," said Winslow, kissing his lady love on the cheek. "You've opened my eyes to a whole new world."  
  
Their bliss was brutally interrupted by a knock on the door. "I'll get that," said Maria, picking up the remote to pause the video. She opened the door and greeted Dolly Proctor, who was wearing one of Muffy's blue dresses.  
  
"Pardon me, ma'am, but I wish to speak to Mr. Winslow," said Dolly with a slight curtsey.  
  
"Of course," Maria responded.  
  
"Alone, if I may."  
  
Maria turned toward Winslow as if seeking approval. The rabbit man stood up, the tips of his ears scraping the ceiling, and gestured with his head. Dolly followed him into Maria's bedroom, and he closed the door.  
  
"Thank you, Dolly, for saving me the trouble of finding you," he said, sitting down on Maria's bed to find relief from the low ceiling.  
  
"Why would you want to find me?" asked Dolly.  
  
"Your love potion is remarkably effective," Winslow replied.  
  
"Oh, dear." Dolly lowered her head in shame. "You've heard about the disaster at Binky's house."  
  
Winslow shook his head. "I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about Maria Harris. I'm going to marry that woman."  
  
Dolly thought for a second, then became alarmed. "Good Lord! She used the potion on you?"  
  
"No, Dolly." Winslow took a deep breath. "I used it on myself."  
  
Confusion spread across Dolly's face.  
  
"But it's not just the potion," Winslow went on. "I'm genuinely in love with her, and I expect to remain so when it wears off."  
  
"But...but why?" Dolly asked earnestly.  
  
"Because a nine-year-old girl who can make such a perfect potion can only be a true Wicasta."  
  
"A true what?" Dolly suddenly felt as if she was no longer talking to the Winslow she knew.  
  
"Wicasta is what my people call your people," Winslow explained.  
  
"My people? Your people? I don't understand."  
  
"Your people are the witches--the women who possess the gift. As for my people, I'll tell you about them later. First, why don't you tell me what it is you wanted to talk to me about?"  
  
Dolly became hesitant, as if fearing to offend the man. Gathering strength, she demanded, "Tell me about your ring, Mr. Winslow."  
  
Winslow glanced down at the jade-colored ring on his right hand.  
  
"When I first saw it," Dolly continued, "I knew it had a kind of magic about it. But I didn't learn until yesterday that you knew how to wield it. You cast a spell on me--a spell that took away my power to lie or do wrong."  
  
Winslow didn't answer, but merely smirked, as if proud of the girl's discernment.  
  
"Where did you get the ring?" Dolly asked anxiously. "Did your people create it? What powers do they have?"  
  
"I'll be happy to answer all your questions," said Winslow with a friendly tone. "But first, I have something to ask of you."  
  
Dolly's curiosity silenced her.  
  
"I would like you to accompany me to Salem." Winslow lowered his voice and bent closer to Dolly. "I've undertaken an important project, and your assistance would be very beneficial."  
  
TBC 


	20. Dolly on Trial

"He said nothing about the nature of the project," Dolly related to Alan and Prunella, who were gathered with her in the Prufrock living room late that afternoon. "I know not why he should need my help."  
  
"Sounds suspicious to me," said Alan, folding his arms. "Maybe he wants to take advantage of your ability to sense gold."  
  
"I'll bet he wants to put you in his museum," Prunella suggested. "People would come from all over the world to see a real live witch."  
  
As they discussed Winslow's request for Dolly's assistance, the front door flew open and Francine rushed in, terrified and panting. "Dolly, hide!" she exclaimed anxiously. "They're coming for you!"  
  
"Who is?" asked Dolly.  
  
"An angry mob!" replied Francine, grabbing Dolly by the arm and trying to lift the girl from her chair.  
  
"Oh, heavens," grumbled Dolly. "It's starting all over again." As Francine coaxed her up the stairway, Alan and Prunella rose to their feet with expressions of concern.  
  
"If this is an early April Fool's joke," Alan remarked, "it's getting out of hand."  
  
"This is all my fault," Prunella lamented. "I shouldn't have dipped into Dolly's love potion."  
  
"No, it's my fault," Francine insisted as she watched Dolly disappear into the attic. "I shouldn't have asked for the potion in the first place."  
  
"Stop blaming yourselves," Alan chided them. "There's a scientific explanation for what happened, and it has nothing to do with magic and love potions."  
  
The front door was still hanging open, and six angry children suddenly burst through--Beat in the lead, with Arthur, Fern, Binky, Muffy, and George following. As they began to search the living room, opening drawers and looking under furniture, Beat stepped up to Prunella and glowered at her. "Where's Dolly?" she demanded.  
  
"Uh, she's not here," Prunella answered evasively. "She just stepped out for, uh, for the rest of her life."  
  
"She's at my place," Alan lied.  
  
"We just came from your place!" retorted Fern, who was checking behind the shower curtain for hidden witch girls.  
  
"What are you gonna do to her?" Prunella asked Beat.  
  
"We have a message to deliver," Beat replied firmly.  
  
"What message?"  
  
Beat raised a fist in the air and shouted, "Dolly must go!" Her five companions followed suit, pumping their fists and chanting, "Dolly must go! Dolly must go!"  
  
"Hey, hold it, Beat," said Francine, confronting her British friend. "What did Dolly ever do to you?"  
  
"She cast a love spell on us!" Beat growled.  
  
"Yeah, well, she cast one on me, too," Francine responded, "but you don't see me trying to run her out of town."  
  
Alan gave Beat a condescending look. "Now just a minute. Both you and I know there's no such thing as witches and magic spells."  
  
"That's easy for you to say," was Beat's reply. "You didn't get the love potion."  
  
"Hey, I found her!" came George's voice from an upper floor. "She's in the attic!"  
  
Without another word, Beat, Arthur, Muffy, Fern, and Binky clambered up the stairway. Alan, Prunella, and Francine followed closely behind, fearing that the worst might happen.  
  
When they reached the attic they saw Dolly cowering behind one of Mrs. Prufrock's old trunks, with George pointing accusingly at her. The six members of the anti-Dolly mob formed a half-circle around her and began to chant once again, "Dolly must go! Dolly must go!"  
  
"Leave her alone!" ordered Prunella, but her voice was not heard.  
  
Certain that death was near, Dolly quivered with fright. Her only hope of escape was a well-aimed bluff. Gathering courage and rising boldly to her feet, she yelled, "Come any closer and I'll turn you all into newts! And you won't get better!"  
  
At first her threat struck fear into the hearts of the mob, but Beat quickly became incredulous. "Don't be absurd," she said, motioning for her friends to stand their ground. "If you turned me into a newt, where would the other eighty pounds of body mass go?"  
  
"What's a newt?" Binky wondered.  
  
"I'm warning you!" Dolly raised her arms menacingly.  
  
"Go ahead," said Beat petulantly. "Turn me into a newt."  
  
The confidence in Dolly's expression faded, and she put her arms down. "I can't," she admitted. "I'm not that powerful."  
  
Beat cleared her throat, and her tone became formal. "Very well, then. The trial of Dolores Maria Proctor on charges of witchcraft will now commence." Dolly, still standing behind the old trunk, began to shake with terror as if she had heard these fateful words before.  
  
"Trial?" exclaimed Alan unbelievingly. "You have no right to put Dolly on trial!"  
  
"Objection overruled," Beat declared. "As my first witness, I call Prunella Prufrock to the stand."  
  
"Who, me?" was Prunella's surprised response. "Don't ask me to witness against Dolly. She made the love potion, but I'm the one who..."  
  
"Thank you, Miss Prufrock," Beat interrupted her. "As my second witness, I call Francine Frensky."  
  
"Leave Dolly alone," urged Francine. "The love potion was my idea. I'm the one who should be on trial."  
  
"Thank you very much, Miss Frensky," Beat intoned pompously. "We now have the testimony of two independent witnesses that Dolly Proctor did indeed prepare a love potion."  
  
"Your Honor, I object," said Alan, raising a hand.  
  
"On what grounds?" Beat wanted to know.  
  
"On the grounds that, uh, nobody was really hurt."  
  
Alan's objection was met with impassioned protests from the other kids.  
  
"My mom grounded me because I couldn't keep my hands off Muffy!" complained Binky.  
  
"I rode all the way to Van's house in his lap!" Fern recounted. "I couldn't stop myself from kissing him!"  
  
"I was so in love with Muffy, I almost killed Binky!" related George.  
  
"I had to stand there while two girls kissed me," Arthur groused. "It was so gross. Then they started fighting."  
  
"I couldn't control myself," Beat told the others. "I could have hurt Prunella very badly."  
  
"What do you mean, you could have hurt Prunella?" Francine asked her.  
  
"She used some kind of martial arts on me," Prunella explained. "She blocked my punches, and then she threw me."  
  
Suddenly suspicious, Francine stepped around the crowd of kids and faced Beat directly. "Is that true?" she inquired, her eyes narrowed. "Did you use martial arts?"  
  
Beat shrugged. "I'm not really sure. I just did what came naturally."  
  
Francine pointed a finger at Beat's aardvark face. "Is there something you're not telling me?"  
  
Confusion filled Beat's eyes. "I-I don't know what you mean," she answered nervously.  
  
Without a word of explanation, Francine pulled back her fist, aimed it at Beat's nose, and let it fly. Reacting instinctively, Beat quickly raised her arm to knock it away from her face. The other kids watched in amazement.  
  
"You told me yourself that you never studied martial arts," snarled Francine, throwing another punch that Beat blocked just as easily. "Yet you're doing fine against me, and I have all of Sue Ellen's skill." She launched a kick at Beat's stomach, but the girl deftly avoided it. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you have somebody else in your head, like I do."  
  
"I assure you, I don't," said Beat as she dodged Francine's attacks.  
  
Arthur bounded forward, hoping to break up the fight before someone was seriously injured. "This is getting violent," he observed, standing between the two girls. "We don't want anyone to get hurt."  
  
"Arthur's right," said George. "Let's all go home and cool off."  
  
"Fine with me," said Binky, who then turned to Dolly. "But you'd better not come to our school tomorrow, or someone's gonna get clobbered, and it's not gonna be me."  
  
"We don't want to see you in our neighborhood anymore, either," Fern barked at Dolly.  
  
"And I want my clothes back," Muffy added.  
  
Arthur, Fern, Binky, Muffy, and George shuffled out of the attic, muttering quietly to each other. Beat remained behind and motioned to Francine, leading her to a corner of the attic where she hoped Alan, Prunella, and Dolly wouldn't hear them.  
  
"Mr. Putnam was combat trained," she whispered to Francine. "It's possible some of his knowledge is still in my brain."  
  
"It's possible all of his knowledge is still in your brain," Francine whispered back. "It's like Mavis said. When he gets in your head he can act just like a normal kid, and nobody knows he's there."  
  
"He's no longer a part of me," Beat insisted, her voice taking on a wounded tone. "I swear it, Frankie."  
  
Apparently not convinced, Francine took a step away from Beat. "I'm watching you," she said in a normal voice, then went to assist the emotionally shaken Dolly.  
  
TBC 


	21. Swanpecked

"I can't wear those," said Dolly, looking disgustedly at the red blouse and pair of blue jeans that Francine had offered her. "I would look like a boy." 

"Don't worry, Dolly," replied Francine, who was visiting the witch girl shortly before the start of school on Monday morning. "Nobody will mistake you for a boy. And you've got to wear something."

Dolly, clad only in the petticoat she had initially appeared in, shoved a nightgown into a suitcase with the rest of the clothes she had borrowed from Muffy. "I refuse to go to school dressed like a boy," she said haughtily. "They have enough reasons to despise and mock me; I shan't give them another."

Francine lay down the blouse and jeans on the dresser in the Powers guest bedroom. "They aren't boy's clothes," she explained. "Maybe in the seventeenth century girls were expected to wear dresses all the time, but it's not that way anymore."

Closing the suitcase, Dolly answered firmly, "I shall wear pants when boys wear dresses, and not before."

"Come on, Dolly!" Francine urged her impatiently. "I don't have time to go back and get you a dress. School's about to start."

"Then let it start without me," said Dolly, flinging the suitcase into Francine's arms. "And tell Muffy I thank her kindly for the use of her garments."

Francine grabbed the suitcase in one hand, and used the other to open the guest bedroom door. "You're not supposed to skip school, you know," she told Dolly before closing the door behind her.

She found Alan in the living room, stuffing science books into his backpack. "How did it go?" he asked her, smiling.

"She's even more anti-pants than Muffy," said Francine with a groan of despair. "But what can you expect from someone who grew up in the seventeenth century?"

"Don't tell me you believe her," said Alan as he fastened the zipper on his pack and threw it over his shoulder.

Francine grabbed her own pack from the floor, and started to follow Alan out of the house, still clutching the suitcase with Muffy's clothes. "Well, she obviously has magical powers," she went on. "You've seen what she can do. And that love potion was something else. I knew when I fell in love with you that the potion was making me do it, but I couldn't control it at all. It's like I was possessed." She sighed wistfully. "And after all this I'm still in love with Arthur, and he still doesn't feel a thing for me."

"I'm just glad I didn't get any of the potion," said Alan seriously. "I hate to think who I might have fallen in love with."

As they drew near to the Lakewood Elementary entrance, they saw Quinn Cooper's Buick parked at the curb, with Odette unfolding Van's wheelchair. Nearby stood the distraught-looking Binky, who was enduring more taunts from his tough customer friends, Molly and Rattles. "Mini Moo Cow, Mini Moo Cow, we love you, Mini Moo..." they sang derisively.

"Lay off, guys," Binky protested weakly. "I quit the show, okay?"

"Oh, but you'll always be Mini Moo to us," said Molly with insincere sweetness.

Rattles stuck up his fingers like horns, and placed them on the sides of his head. "Hey, watch me," he joked. "I can count to ten. One...two..." Each time he counted off a number, he scraped the sidewalk with the sole of his shoe.

Odette overheard the exchange while helping Van into his chair, and decided to do something about it. As Van rolled up the ramp and Quinn waited in the driver's seat, the swan girl approached Molly and Rattles, stretched her neck as high as it would go, and glared sternly down at the pair.

"I don't like it when you talk to my boyfriend that way," she chided them.

At first Rattles and Molly became nervous at the sight of an older and much, much taller girl standing over them...until they realized that about eighteen inches of her height was nothing more than excess neck.

While Binky expressed surprise that Odette had come to his defense, the tough customer kids glared up at her with defiance. "I didn't hear nobody ask for your opinion," snarled Rattles.

"You didn't hear _anybody_," Odette corrected him.

"Oh, now you're my English teacher," Rattles shot back.

"Were you always a swan," Molly asked Odette, "or were you born an ugly dorkling?"

Odette's indignation grew as rapidly as Quinn's impatience. Clenching her feathery fists, she warned, "I'll give you three seconds to either take back what you just said, or start running."

Molly's tone remained petulant. "And what if I don't? You ballet geeks don't scare..."

Before she could finish, Odette's neck swung down like a hammer, and the tough rabbit girl felt the painful sensation of a swan beak striking the top of her head. "OOOWWW!" she cried in fear and agony. Odette pecked her three more times, messing up her hair until her eyes almost became visible, before she managed to raise her arms to protect herself. But it was in vain, for Odette's beak had too much momentum behind it. Her head threatening to turn into a mass of lumps, Molly did the wisest thing she could think of--she ran away as fast as she could.

Then Odette glowered at Rattles and folded her arms. "Am I a ballet geek?" she asked simply.

"Er, ah, no," stuttered the terrified Rattles. "B-ballet's cool. I, uh, like to watch it."

"Good," said Odette, smirking. "Then I'll expect to see you at the recital this coming weekend."

Rattles took a few hesitant steps away from Odette, then started to run after Molly. Sighing with relief, Odette relaxed her neck into its usual curved position. "Is it true?" Binky asked, looking up at her. "Am I your boyfriend again?"

"You're a boy, and you're my friend," Odette told him. "I gotta go now." As Binky watched in discouragement, the swan girl climbed into her sister's Buick and was quickly speeding away--but not before Binky caught a glimpse of some familiar-looking orange hair puffs in the front passenger seat of the vehicle.

"No, it can't be," he thought, shaking his head.

Francine and Alan walked past him with a friendly greeting, and passed through the doors of the school building. They didn't get far before noticing that a familiar face had returned...

"It's Mr. Haney!" exclaimed Francine.

"He's back!" enthused Alan. "He's better!"

Indeed, Principal Herbert Haney was standing in front of his office, talking to several students with a somewhat scratchy voice. As Alan stepped closer, he noted that the other kids were his classmates Floyd Walton, Bonnie Chandler, and Max Alwyn.

"Here he comes now," said Floyd bitterly when he saw Alan walk up. "The traitor."

Alan felt his stomach twist. The fifth-graders in his class had always resented him to a degree because he outperformed them academically despite being a year younger...but the recent replacement of their teacher had raised the tension another notch.

"I'm glad you're back, Mr. Haney," said Alan, ignoring the scowls directed at him.

"What was wrong with you?" asked Francine, who had followed Alan.

"Just a bout of pneumonia," rasped Principal Haney. "Nothing bed rest, fluids, antibiotics, and a few lollipops wouldn't cure."

Bonnie turned to Alan with fire in her eyes. "We were just explaining how you and The Rat conspired to get rid of Mr. Baker," she informed him.

"And now we're totally stuck with Her Royal Dorkness, Mrs. Krantz," Max complained.

"Now, now, children, it's not Alan's fault," Mr. Haney tried to calm them. "The school board made the decision to fire Mr. Baker, and I agree with it. Mrs. Krantz is a fine teacher, and you may find her a little strange at first, but the important thing is, you'll learn."

"Sitting through one of her lessons is like being licked by a moose for an hour," Floyd complained. "How am I supposed to learn anything?"

"Hey, let's make Alan the teacher," Bonnie suggested. "He's smarter than all of us put together."

"Great idea," agreed Max, turning to Alan. "Dude, you are hereby appointed to teach us."

For a brief moment Alan was tempted by the proposal, but he knew it wasn't at all realistic. There was no easy way out of the situation, but fifth grade would be over in three short months...

"What do you say, Alan?" Floyd encouraged him.

Alan grinned facetiously. "Okaaaay."

TBC


	22. Binky Moo Cow

"Ancient Greece was the birthplace of philosophy," Mr. Wald related to his fourth-graders as he wrote the word PHILOSOPHY in large letters on the board. "Philosophy is the search for answers to life's biggest questions. Can any of you think of a question you've always wanted an answer to?"  
  
The kids fell silent as wind-driven tumbleweeds rolled across their barren minds. Finally Beat raised her hand. "Yes, Beatrice?"  
  
"Why am I myself, and not someone else?" asked the rabbit-aardvark girl.  
  
Mr. Wald appeared deep in thought. "I think I can answer that," he finally said. "If you were somebody else, then you would still be yourself, but you'd be a different yourself. Does that make sense?"  
  
"No," replied Beat.  
  
Mr. Wald glanced around the room, hoping another student would chime in with a question to save him from having to pursue Beat's. Shortly Arthur raised his hand. "Why am I here?" he inquired.  
  
"Because you're a kid," Mr. Wald answered without hesitation, "and this is school." The other kids giggled.  
  
Binky was the next to submit a question. "One night I was lying in the grass, looking up at the stars," he recounted, "and I asked myself, 'Why?' Then I heard a voice, and it said, 'Because I'm bigger than you.'" The kids laughed again.  
  
The door to the classroom slowly opened, and in shuffled Dolly Proctor, wearing Francine's blouse and jeans along with a ghastly scowl. Arthur, Fern, George, Muffy, Binky, and Beat immediately began to glower at her. "You're late, Dolly," Mr. Wald pointed out to her.  
  
"Indeed," grumbled the rat girl as she searched for a desk located next to a sympathetic face. "Three hundred years late. And in my absence, girls started to dress like boys." She took a seat by Francine, the only student who was willing to smile at her.  
  
It was a long, uncomfortable lesson for Dolly, and when the bell finally rang, most of the kids looked up at the ceiling as they walked past her. Fearing she would be left friendless, she tried to build a rapport with those who had not been present at the previous night's trial, starting with Mavis. "Hello, Mavis," she greeted the hamster girl, who widened her eyes in terror and hurried away.  
  
"I guess she hasn't forgotten about the snake," remarked Francine, who hadn't left Dolly's side.  
  
She then attempted to strike up some banter with Van as the duck boy rolled along the hallway. "Hello, Van, how are you this morning?"  
  
"Uh, I don't think I should talk to you," said Van nervously. Dolly watched in dejection as he accelerated his wheelchair and sped away.  
  
Francine tried to comfort the sad-faced girl by putting an arm around her shoulders. "It's no use," Dolly moaned. "They're afraid of me. They don't understand."  
  
"Big deal," said Francine with a grin. "I don't understand either, but I still think you're cool. Well, the Sue Ellen part of me thinks so, anyway. The Francine part's still undecided."  
  
The two girls then encountered Mr. Haney, who wore a stern expression. "Dolly Proctor?" he said hoarsely.  
  
"I am she," was Dolly's response.  
  
"I'd like to talk to you in my office," the principal requested.  
  
Moments later, Dolly was seated in front of Mr. Haney's desk as Francine waited outside the office door. "What happened to the other fellow?" Dolly asked as she carefully removed the wrapper from a lollipop.  
  
"Mr. Ratburn took over temporarily while I was sick," Haney answered. "He told me all about you. Dolly, if you want to continue attending our school, we need to attend to some things. First, we need to transfer your academic records from your old school."  
  
Dolly took a few licks from her lollipop. "My old school was a one-room schoolhouse in Davenport, in the colony of New Hampshire," she informed him. "I doubt it still exists."  
  
"That's another thing," said Mr. Haney, leaning over his desk. "New Hampshire is a state, not a colony. You were born in the twentieth century, not the seventeenth. Your parents may or may not be dead, but they didn't die three hundred years ago."  
  
"They most assuredly did," Dolly insisted.  
  
Haney peered thoughtfully at her, then put his fist over his mouth and coughed a few times. "I don't think you understand how serious this is," he went on. "Unless someone identifies you or claims you, we have no choice but to turn you over to the Department of Social Services. You'll end up in a foster home, and you may not like it."  
  
"Alan's parents are taking good care of me," Dolly stated.  
  
"That's all well and good," Haney continued, "but we still need to enter you into the system. You need a legal identity, school records, immunizations, a social security number, and all that. Plus I'm going to recommend a full psychiatric evaluation."  
  
About a minute later the office door opened, and Dolly emerged, looking even more desolate than before. "Well?" was all Francine could think of to say.  
  
"He thinks I'm crazy," replied Dolly gloomily. "He wants to put me in the mad house."  
  
"You're not crazy," Francine reassured her. "And even if you are, we've come a long way in the treatment of mental illnesses." A few feet away Binky sat on a bench, reading a comic book and listening in on the girls' conversation.  
  
"Maybe I should stop using my magic, and pretend to be normal," Dolly suggested.  
  
"That's stupid!" Francine retorted. "You have a special gift. You shouldn't hide it just because other people don't understand. If they hate you or make fun of you because of your gift, then use it even more. Show them that you're proud of it and won't give it up, no matter what they do."  
  
"Hmm," thought Binky as an idea formed in his mind.  
  
As Dolly wandered back to Mr. Wald's classroom accompanied by Francine, she looked down at her borrowed clothes and sighed plaintively. "Francine, have you never wanted to put on a beautiful dress, and wear it around the town for everyone to see?" she asked.  
  
Francine's expression became wistful as she recalled the many lovely native outfits that Sue Ellen had worn over the course of her travels. Outfits that Francine wouldn't be caught dead in...  
  
"I look stupid in a dress," was her curt reply.  
  
----  
  
Lunch hour arrived, but not everyone used the time for eating purposes. Dolly followed Francine to her apartment so that she could change into one of Francine's--correction, Francine's only dress. "At last I feel like a girl again," she remarked blissfully.  
  
At the same time, Mrs. Stiles drove Binky and Fern to the TV studio, where they picked up a few items from the New Moo Revue set...  
  
----  
  
The kids in the playground were in for a major surprise during afternoon recess. Arthur and George, lounging atop the jungle gym, were the first to see a person in a cow costume round the corner of the school building.  
  
"Arthur, look!" cried George, pointing. "I don't believe it!"  
  
"It's...it's Mini Moo!" exclaimed Arthur.  
  
The two boys quickly climbed down as the excited schoolchildren began to throng Mary Moo Cow's sidekick. "Mini Moo! Mini Moo!" they chanted with glee.  
  
"Yes, it's me, Mini Moo," said the cow with a cheerful voice. Hidden behind a corner of the building, Fern spoke into a cordless microphone, her words piped through a speaker hidden in the cow costume.  
  
"I just love your show!" yelled a first-grade sheep girl.  
  
"I know all the songs by heart!" boasted a second-grade rat boy. The crowd surrounding Mini Moo grew larger by the second.  
  
"Let's sing the 'Dodo the Clown' song!" bellowed the cow, waving its arms. "Dodo the Clown was a happy, happy clown," the kids sang along. "He always wore a smile, he never wore a frown..."  
  
Muffy and Mavis had drawn close to the mob out of curiosity. "That's Fern's voice, but the costume's too big for her," Muffy observed.  
  
"It must be Binky," Mavis added. "That would explain why we didn't see either of them at lunch."  
  
"Don't tell anybody," Muffy ordered. "I think I know what he's up to."  
  
Hearing the uproar, Molly and Rattles hurried toward the scene, expecting to witness a fight. They slowed down and stopped when they realized that a singing cow was the attraction. After a few seconds of incredulous staring, they smiled moronically.  
  
"Dude, it's Mini Moo!" Rattles enthused.  
  
"Wow, a real TV star!" gushed Molly.  
  
As the two bullies shoved their way through the dozens of children, Rattles reached into his bag and pulled out a pen and notebook. Presenting them to Mini Moo, he requested, "Can I get your autograph, dude?"  
  
"Sure, dude," said the cow, but this time the voice was different...  
  
Rattles' face fell when he realized what he had been suckered into. He had done many stupid things in his life, but now he was worthy to be crowned His Majesty, the King of Stupid. He pulled back the pen and notebook, and groaned pathetically. "Oh, man...oh, man..."  
  
"We will, like, never hear the end of this," Molly lamented.  
  
As the kids watched in surprise, Mini Moo reached up and pulled off his mask, revealing to all the smirking countenance of Binky Barnes. The sound of hearts plummeting was almost tangible.  
  
"What are you all doing here?" Binky taunted the crowd. "New Moo Revue is a baby show! Oh, I get it! You're all babies! Baby, baby, baby..."  
  
The throng of kids quickly dispersed, each one glancing around fearfully as if hoping not to be seen. Fern appeared from behind her corner, switching off the microphone she held, while Arthur, George, Muffy, and Mavis gathered around Binky the Cow with congratulatory smiles.  
  
"Are you still here?" Binky goaded them. "Do you want to sing another baby song? Baby, baby, baby..."  
  
"We knew it was you all along, Binky," George bragged.  
  
"I don't think they'll make fun of you after this," said Mavis proudly.  
  
Binky lifted a costumed fist into the air. "I don't care if they do or not. Binky Moo Cow is here to stay!"  
  
----  
  
At the end of the school day, Alan and Dolly joined Prunella on the way to her house. "I had the most miserable day," Dolly complained. "Almost everyone in my class hates me because of the accident with the love potion, and the principal thinks I'm crazy and wants to put me in an institution."  
  
"I don't think you're crazy," said Prunella comfortingly.  
  
"I, uh, don't think you belong in an institution," Alan added.  
  
They soon arrived at Prunella's house to find that her mother was entertaining several guests--Angus Winslow, Maria Harris, and her daughter, Nadine. "Hello, Mr. Winslow," Dolly greeted the tall rabbit man.  
  
Nadine jumped down from Winslow's lap and rushed to meet the kids. "Mr. Winslow's gonna be my new daddy!" announced the thrilled little girl.  
  
"No kidding!" exclaimed Prunella, facing Maria with amazement.  
  
"It's true," Maria confirmed. "Angus proposed to me last night. We've set the date for the end of April." She lifted her right hand to show off the diamond engagement ring that Winslow had purchased from the jewelry store where she worked.  
  
"Incredible," Alan remarked. "It's the biggest whirlwind romance since Paolo and Francesca." Prunella shot him a blank stare.  
  
"I'm happy for you both," said Dolly, who then glanced down at Nadine. "I mean, the three of you."  
  
"Maria is an angel," said Winslow, "and Nadine is a little angel. I belong with them." To add emphasis, he leaned over and planted a kiss on Maria's eager lips.  
  
Prunella started to sniffle. "They...they look so happy together..."  
  
Dolly stepped closer to Mr. Winslow. "I know that nothing could make you happier than you are now," she said formally, "but I shall venture nonetheless. I've decided to go with you to Salem, as you requested."  
  
Impossible as it seemed, Winslow's glowing face lit up even more.  
  
"You are one of the few who does not fear or misunderstand my powers," Dolly commended him. "I'm certain you shall put them to good use."  
  
"You won't regret this," Winslow assured her.  
  
"If Dolly's going, then I'm going too," said Prunella. "Someone needs to keep an eye on her." She turned to face her mother, who nodded approvingly.  
  
"Count me in, too," said Alan with boldness.  
  
"Very well," said the gratified Winslow. "Will the weekend after next work for all of you?"  
  
(Next chapter: Winslow's secret revealed! Please give more reviews!) 


	23. Winslow's Secret

In the days leading up to the planned trip to Salem, Dolly continued to attend Mr. Wald's fourth-grade class, despite the hostility of her classmates. Francine remained close to her, Adil only offered glib greetings, and Mavis gradually became more comfortable in her presence. As for Beat, Arthur, Muffy, Binky, Fern, and George, they noticed after a week had passed that they hadn't suffered from any more curses or enchantments, so they became willing once again to talk to Dolly, although not much. Only Van continued to deliberately avoid her, fearing his mother's warning about the evils of witchcraft. 

The Department of Social Services, finding no record of a Dolly Proctor, allowed her to stay with the Powers on the condition that they provide her with clothing as well as food. So she enjoyed her first shopping trip at the mall, accompanied by Mrs. Powers and Prunella, who served as fashion consultant due to Muffy's unwillingness. On several occasions she begged Mrs. Powers to drive her to downtown Elwood City, so she could walk about in one of her new dresses and be admired by passing pedestrians.

Mr. Winslow returned to Salem for a week, claiming that he needed to arrange some affairs with his associates. When he returned to Maria's waiting arms, he said that his "people" were overjoyed to learn of the existence of a surviving Wicasta.

Binky resumed his role as Mini Moo, to the elation of Fern and Mrs. Stiles. Only a few kids at school dared to mock him, but they soon grew tired of it. In addition, some of the kids expressed an interest in meeting Odette's new classmate who looked and acted like an older copy of Sue Ellen, but April was usually too busy to meet with them.

Soon it was Saturday morning, and Dolly and her friends prepared to travel to Salem with Mr. Winslow and the Harrises. Mrs. Prufrock drove Dolly, Prunella, and Alan in her station wagon, while Winslow transported Maria and Nadine in his old Pontiac.

"Have a good trip, guys," said Francine, who was seeing them off at Prunella's house.

"Wish you could come," said Alan as he boarded Mrs. Prufrock's car.

"I've already been to Salem," Francine responded. "I mean, Sue Ellen's already been there."

The drive to Salem took about six hours on the interstate highways. Alan sat in the front passenger seat next to Mrs. Prufrock, while the girls were seated in the back. Prunella passed the time by teaching Dolly how to play video games on her GameGirl unit, while Alan exercised his singing chops.

"Ninety-nine bottles of ammonium citrate on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of ammonium citrate..." he warbled, hitting an occasional sour note.

Dolly entertained Prunella by waving her hand over the GameGirl, causing it to repeatedly disappear and reappear. A road sign went by with the message, BOSTON, 212 MILES.

"Take one down, pour it on the ground, no more bottles of ammonium citrate on the wall," Brain went on. "Ninety-nine bottles of sodium dichloride on the wall..."

"Hey, Alan," Prunella warned him, "you'd better stop before you get busted by the EPA."

"Are we there yet, Mrs. Prufrock?" Dolly asked.

"No, not yet," came the impatient reply.

A road sign went by: BOSTON, 138 MILES.

"Are we there yet?" asked Dolly.

"No, we're not there yet," Mrs. Prufrock grumbled.

"That's what you said last time," Dolly pointed out.

Another road sign passed: BOSTON, 77 MILES. YOU'RE NOT THERE YET.

----

While Dolly and the others made their way toward Salem, the phone rang at the Frensky apartment. Catherine answered and called Francine. When she picked up the receiver, Francine heard the voice of someone Sue Ellen had known and loved for a long time--Carla Fuente. "We would like you to join us for lunch at Nigel's house," said the Costa Rican woman.

"I'd love to," Francine replied.

Thrilled by the invitation, she threw on a jacket and rushed around the block to Mr. Ratburn's place of residence. Carla, dressed in a white chiffon wedding gown, welcomed her inside. Nigel Ratburn, seated on the couch, leaped to his feet. "Francine, it's so good to see you," he greeted her warmly.

"Uh, hi, Nige...er, Mr. Ratburn," said Francine, forgetting momentarily that it was Sue Ellen's custom, not her own, to call the former teacher by his first name. "What are you up to these days?"

"Well, there's a third-grade teaching position opening up in two weeks," Mr. Ratburn told her. "It's in a school across town, so I'll have to commute. But I hope to return to Lakewood for the next school year."

"I'm trying on wedding dresses," Carla explained. "We decided that if Nigel gets the teaching job, we'll be engaged. If he doesn't, we'll wait a little longer."

"I think you should just get married and have it done with," Francine remarked. Wandering into the kitchen, she examined the place settings and freshly prepared chile rellenos on the table. _I'm going to get heartburn again_, she thought.

Then she noticed...there were four place settings. "Who else is coming?" she asked Carla.

Her question found its answer when a familiar voice called to her from the direction of the guest bedroom. "Francine!"

She froze to the spot. It couldn't possibly be who she thought it was...

She slowly turned...and gasped. Standing in the doorway of the guest bedroom was a girl nearly a foot and a half taller, with pointed cat ears and orange hair puffs. Francine knew immediately that she had to be a close relation of Sue Ellen's, as she was virtually identical except for her age. But how did this strange girl know her name?

Then it hit her. "You must be the girl Van was telling me..."

Her sentence was broken off when the delighted cat girl rushed toward her and grabbed her in a firm, almost suffocating bear hug. "Oh, Francine!" she gushed. "I'm so glad!"

"Can't...breathe..." rasped Francine.

The older girl relaxed her grip. "Is it true?" she asked breathlessly. "Do you play drums and sax? Do you have two personalities in your head?"

"Uh...uh-huh," Francine muttered, trying to twist her way out of the girl's arms. In the living room, Nigel went back to admiring Carla's wedding gown.

"I was so worried," said the cat girl, her voice filled with concern. "I didn't know if it happened to you, too."

"If what happened?" Francine became confused. "Who are you, anyway?"

"You know who I am," said the girl, pulling her arms away. "I don't need to tell you. I'm a part of you. In fact, we're almost the same person."

Unable to believe what she was hearing and feeling, Francine backed away and waved her hands. "No, no!" she exclaimed. "You can't be Sue Ellen. You're too old. You must be eleven or..."

"Twelve," said the girl with pride. "And you're right, I'm not Sue Ellen...not anymore. My name's April Murphy now."

Francine's bewilderment grew. "I need to sit down," she mumbled, pulling a chair away from the dining table. April Murphy took a seat next to her, a glowing smile still wrapped around her face.

All at once, it occurred to Francine why Sue Ellen might have found it necessary to go by a different name. "April Murphy is your new identity," she said slowly, as if experiencing an epiphany. "Sue Ellen is dead, or thought to be dead."

April nodded.

Francine glanced anxiously into the living room, where Nigel was examining Carla's gown from the back. "How much do they know?" she asked April. "I know I never told them anything."

"I swore them to secrecy," April answered.

Francine took another furtive glance at Nigel and Carla, then started to interrogate April. "I thought your phony AIDS death wasn't supposed to happen for another two years."

"It wasn't," April replied, "and it didn't."

"How did you get to be twelve years old?" Francine asked next. "Is it some kind of top-secret technology that makes you grow fast?"

April shook her head.

Her mind spinning, Francine struggled to think of another explanation, and finally did. "Time travel," she half-whispered.

April nodded again.

Francine's eyes widened. "But that's impossible!"

"Three years from now, it won't be."

After a moment's consideration, Francine rose quickly to her feet. "You're trying to change history," she theorized, pointing a finger at April. "Something terrible is about to happen, and you've come back to prevent it. What is it?"

"I can't tell you."

"Come on, Sue Ellen!" Francine pleaded.

"April." The cat girl scowled seriously. "You must call me April from now on. Sue Ellen no longer exists."

Francine sighed with frustration.

"I just had to see you before I left town," said April, her voice filling with emotion again. "I had to know how you were doing. I was afraid you'd be stuck as Sue Ellen alone in Francine's body, with no way to find us."

"Why are you leaving town?" asked Francine suspiciously.

"Something very important is about to take place," April replied. "I want to get as far away as I can so my presence won't interfere with it."

"Is it bad?" Francine wanted to know. "Should I leave town too?"

"You should stay here and go about your life as if we never had this conversation."

Francine frowned. She felt somehow that April was hiding something from her...a very big something. Something even bigger than the revelation that Mr. Armstrong was a CIA agent.

"Well," said April casually, "how about some lunch?"

----

It was mid-afternoon when the travelers arrived at the Winslow Witch Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Mrs. Prufrock and Mr. Winslow parked their cars next to each other, and then led Maria, Nadine, Alan, Prunella, and Dolly to the front entrance of the building. It was a slow tourism day (not being Halloween), so only a few visitors were congregated on the sidewalk.

"Hey, Gus," said a black-haired goose woman who wore a tour guide badge.

Winslow gestured toward the people who were with him. "These are friends of mine. I'd like you to give them a free tour of the museum."

"Sure," said the goose woman, stepping toward a roped-off path. "Right this way."

As they started to follow the tour guide, Winslow laid a hand on Dolly's shoulder. "You can take the tour later. Right now, we have a little work to do."

"Yes, Mr. Winslow," said Dolly obediently.

While Mrs. Prufrock, Maria, Nadine, Alan, and Prunella visited the various exhibits of 17th-century witch trial memorabilia, Winslow led Dolly to the rear of the building and down a stone stairway. The two found themselves in front of what appeared to be a solid white door, with no visible doorknob or method of entry.

"Dolly, see if you can open that door," Winslow ordered.

Dolly laid her hands on the surface of the door and pushed with all her might, but the door didn't move an inch. She tried pounding on it, but with no effect. Finally she stood back and said, "Uh...open sesame?" Still nothing happened.

Winslow stuck out his left arm to push Dolly back, then waved his right hand in front of the door. It immediately slid open, revealing a darkened passage.

Guessing that Winslow's magic ring had enabled him to control the door, Dolly followed him into the strange, dark chamber. As the door closed behind them, Winslow waved his hand again, and a lamp turned on. Dolly found herself in a bizarre-looking room that appeared to be a sort of laboratory, although she had only seen pictures of such places in children's books. Several long tables were positioned next to each other; on them were laid natural gas burners, vats of colored fluids, and weirdly colored stones and tablets. On a shelf nearby were stored arrays of labeled glass jars that contained substances of all imaginable colors and textures.

"Amazing," said Dolly in wonder.

"Don't touch anything...yet," Winslow commanded her.

Dolly turned her head this way and that, unable to believe what she was experiencing. "Magic," she marveled. "Magical ingredients, magical potions, magical stones...I've never seen so much magic in one place."

"That's right," said Winslow. "Without the gift of the Wicasta, you'd think this was just another science lab. Tell me, what sort of enchantments could you put together using the items in this room?"

Dolly shook her head in confusion. "Oh, good heavens, I can't even imagine. Almost any sort of enchantment, I think."

"I'm ready to tell you about my people," Winslow announced calmly.

Dolly stood still and didn't breathe.

"I am an alchemist," Winslow told her. "My associates are alchemists, and so are many of my ancestors."

TBC


	24. The Cleansing Stone

"I've heard of alchemists before," said Dolly. "They can supposedly turn lead into gold."  
  
As Winslow spoke, he picked up several colored stones from a table and fumbled with them. "We alchemists have known how to turn base metals into gold since before you were born. But our purpose--our dream, if you will--is something altogether different."  
  
"And what is your purpose?" Dolly inquired.  
  
"A perfect world." Winslow stared at Dolly with piercing eyes. "The elimination of all that is evil."  
  
Dolly realized that she had heard words similar to those before...  
  
"You think of good and evil as metaphysical concepts," Winslow went on. "To us alchemists, they're measurable quantities. Each one of us is born into the world with an equal measure of good and evil in our souls. Which side we choose is up to us, but they are always there, pulling us in one direction or the other." He held up his right hand, and the light of a nearby lamp reflected off of his jade ring. "My ring contains a special stone created by my great-grandfather. With it, I can cause a person's good side to temporarily become dominant."  
  
"That's what you did to me," Dolly reflected. "That's why I couldn't help but tell the truth about the love potion."  
  
"Exactly," said Winslow, leaning against a table. "Now, Dolly, imagine if everyone in the world suddenly became good. There would be no crime, no war, no hatred, no prejudice, and most importantly, no reality TV."  
  
"What a wonderful kind of day," Dolly mused.  
  
"This has been the dream of the alchemists from the beginning," Winslow continued. "To that end we have exhaustively studied the magical properties of nearly every known element and compound. However, this is a very time-consuming process, involving a great deal of trial and error. This is where you come in, Dolly. You are all that remains of the Wicasta. With your innate magical sense, you can unlock secrets in an instant that otherwise would require decades of alchemic research."  
  
Stepping over to an old wooden desk, he opened a drawer and pulled out a slip of creased paper on which were written a list of ingredients and instructions. "Take this potion, for instance." He handed the paper to Dolly, who started to read it with interest. "My people have been trying to prepare it correctly for hundreds of years. All the factors--the purity and balance of ingredients, the temperature, the heating time--have to be exact in order to achieve the desired potency. If anything is off in the slightest, you end up with something like the stone in my ring. That's why I need you, Dolly. With your talent, you can detect any loss in potency during the preparation."  
  
"The Cleansing Stone," Dolly muttered, lowering the paper. "What is it good for, may I ask?"  
  
Winslow plucked the paper from Dolly's hands and laid on a table in front of an unlit gas burner. "The Cleansing Stone is the key to a power greater than that of God Himself," he proclaimed pretentiously.  
  
"That's silly," Dolly responded. "Nothing is more powerful than God."  
  
Winslow smiled sheepishly. "Let me rephrase that. With a Cleansing Stone in your hand, you have access to a power that God either does not possess, or is unwilling to use--the power to extinguish the evil in human souls."  
  
Dolly felt herself becoming nervous, or perhaps intimidated.  
  
"Theologians and philosophers have struggled with the problem of evil since the beginning," Winslow continued. "If you assume that God is all-powerful and loves His children, then you must ask yourself, why does He allow evil to run rampant on the earth? Why must even those who do good deeds and say their prayers at night suffer from the lawlessness and corruption around them?"  
  
"I never thought about that," said Dolly, looking at the floor.  
  
"With a Cleansing Stone, you will never need to think about it." Winslow reached down and rubbed the top of Dolly's head. "What do you say? Will you help me to create a perfect world?"  
  
Dolly pondered for a moment, then raised her head and smiled. "I will, Mr. Winslow."  
  
"Excellent." Winslow reached up and grabbed a glass container from a top shelf, which was about even with his ears. "Let's get started, shall we?"  
  
The Cleansing Stone potion took roughly an hour to prepare. While Winslow carefully mixed ingredients in a vial atop a gas burner, Dolly watched the process like a young hawk, giving him advice on how much of each ingredient to add and when to raise or lower the temperature. As the jade-green mixture bubbled and boiled, she began to feel more and more uneasy, as though she were abetting in the creation of a monster. The kind of magic she saw in it was unlike anything with which she was familiar.  
  
"Turn off the heat...now," she instructed Winslow, who complied. Carefully lifting the vial with a pair of plastic tongs, he slowly emptied it into a square bronze mold, then replaced it on the burner.  
  
"There it is, Dolly," he said proudly, gazing down at the steaming green substance. "All we have to do now is wait for it to solidify."  
  
"How long will that take?" asked Dolly. "I'm hungry."  
  
"It should be solid by morning," Winslow told her. "In the meantime, let's join the others and get some donuts."  
  
----  
  
"It was believed that the Wicasta died out during the 17th-century witch hunts," Winslow related. He was seated along with Maria, Nadine, Mrs. Prufrock, Alan, Prunella, and Dolly at a table in a Dunkin Donuts shop. "But now, thanks to Hannah Proctor's locket, we've found a survivor."  
  
Dolly hardly noticed that the others were talking about her; she was too busy ravenously gobbling up one donut after another. "Oh, I do so love donuts," she mumbled with a full mouth.  
  
"You'll get fat if you eat too many," Prunella warned her.  
  
"Then I shall be a happy fat girl," said Dolly, taking a large bite out of a chocolate cruller.  
  
"I'd like to know more about this project of yours," Alan requested.  
  
"I'd rather keep it a surprise until it's done," Winslow responded. "It's very sensitive. I have competitors, you know."  
  
"You said this magic sense is only passed down to females," Maria noted. "We have something like that in our family. Only the girls are born with tails."  
  
"It's something genetic, I suppose." Winslow wiped the sugar from his lips with a napkin, then reached into the box for a maple bar. "The Y chromosome must prevent men from growing tails or developing Wicasta powers."  
  
A pimple-faced poodle girl in a fast-food uniform approached their table. "Can I get you anything else?" she asked.  
  
"More donuts!" exclaimed Dolly.  
  
Prunella groaned with delight. "Are you really eating them, or just making them disappear?"  
  
----  
  
Later that day the group arrived at the Salem Mairzydoats Hotel, where Winslow had booked a room for Mrs. Prufrock, Dolly, Alan, and Prunella (he had invited the Harrises to spend the night at his house). Dolly was awestruck at the lavish furnishings of the hotel's reception area. "It's like a castle!" she cried.  
  
"Yeah," Alan rejoined. "Only a king could afford to live here."  
  
Dolly's amazement grew as she and the others entered their room, which featured three beds and several seascape pictures on the walls. "Oh, it's heavenly," she remarked. "Why should anyone want to stay here for only a night?"  
  
"Two reasons," quipped Prunella. "Food and clothing."  
  
While Alan and Prunella discussed homework and Winslow's mysterious project, and Mrs. Prufrock filed her nails and tried on some new bead bracelets, Dolly discovered the unspeakable joys of room service.  
  
"How can I help you?" asked the young chipmunkish man who appeared in the doorway.  
  
"I would very much like some donuts," said Dolly eagerly.  
  
"We don't serve donuts until morning," explained the hotel employee. "Continental breakfast, six to nine a.m."  
  
Dolly was undaunted. "Then I shall have ice cream instead."  
  
"The shop on the first floor has ice cream bars for sale," the employee informed her.  
  
"Then go and fetch me one, thou knave," said Dolly, growing impatient.  
  
Mrs. Prufrock laid a hand on Dolly's shoulder and pushed her back. "I'm sorry about my, uh, niece," she apologized. "We're working on her social skills."  
  
"I can bring her an ice cream bar, ma'am," said the employee. "It's no trouble."  
  
"Don't bother yourself," said Mrs. Prufrock with a wave of her hand. "She's had plenty to eat already."  
  
As the young hotel worker closed the door, Dolly turned and scowled at Mrs. Prufrock. "The servants in this hotel do not know their place," she complained.  
  
The night passed quickly. Alan snored away in one bed, Prunella and Dolly in another, and Mrs. Prufrock in the third.  
  
They enjoyed a continental breakfast in the morning (Dolly ate every donut in sight), and then drove to the museum to meet with Mr. Winslow and the Harrises. This time Winslow allowed Alan and Prunella to accompany him and Dolly to the hidden laboratory, as they had expressed curiosity about it.  
  
Alan was especially amazed by Winslow's ability to open the sliding door and turn on the lamps with a mere wave of his hand. Since it couldn't be magic, he attributed it to some sort of nanoelectronic device implanted in the man's skin.  
  
They soon entered the main room, where all of Winslow's ingredients and implements were kept. "Ooooh...aaaah..." marveled Alan and Prunella.  
  
Winslow and Dolly hurried over to the table where they had left the cooling green solution the previous day. Inside the bronze mold lay a square, marbled jade stone about the size of a child's hand; the uninformed visitor might have taken it for a piece of tacky bathroom tile.  
  
Winslow pulled the stone from the mold and turned it around in his fingers. The look of supreme triumph on his face suggested that he might burst into maniacal laughter at any moment.  
  
"What is it?" Prunella asked him.  
  
"The solution to all of our problems," Winslow gloated. "If it works according to specifications, that is." Carefully laying down the stone, he pulled his cell phone from his belt and gestured with his ring hand toward a passageway that apparently led to another room. "You children wait in there. I'm going to make some calls."  
  
The three kids walked into the other room, which consisted of little more than bare white walls and a few worn-down items of furniture. While Alan and Prunella seated themselves on a Victorian couch, Dolly remained standing, glancing to and fro.  
  
"I had no idea Mr. Winslow was a scientist in his spare time," Alan marveled.  
  
Then he and Prunella watched as Dolly put out her arms and shuffled in almost a trance-like manner toward one of the bare walls. "Dolly, what is it?" Prunella asked her.  
  
"There's...a door...in that wall..." came Dolly's monotonic response.  
  
"I don't see one," said Alan.  
  
"I...can feel it..."  
  
When Dolly reached the wall and rested her hands on it, a surprising thing occurred. An entire section of the wall slid noiselessly backward and then sideways, leaving a passage through which Dolly unhesitatingly stepped.  
  
"Hey, Dolly, I don't think you should go in there," Prunella called to her, but the girl had already disappeared into the dim light of whatever lay on the other side of the wall.  
  
Alan slowly rose, stuck out his arms, and started to walk robotically toward the mysterious doorway. "Must...enter...secret...room..." he mumbled.  
  
"Oh, knock it off," Prunella groused, and Alan lowered his arms and grinned.  
  
Dolly had found herself in the midst of what she imagined must be an ancient library. Several wooden shelves were positioned parallel to each other, and were filled with large, primitively bound books. The only light came from the lamp in the room she had just left, and it was insufficient. As Alan and Prunella came up behind her, she waved her hand in the air and said, "Let there be light." By her command, the entire library became illuminated, although she could not tell where the light emanated from.  
  
"How did you do that?" Alan asked her.  
  
"I'm not sure," Dolly replied. "I figured if Winslow can turn on lights with magic, then so can I. I'm a witch, don't forget."  
  
For several minutes they wandered through the book racks, while Winslow was making cell phone calls to his associates. Many of the books had bizarre titles--"Wonders with Wormwood", "Hemlock for Dummies", "You Want to Turn WHAT into Gold?"  
  
"I take back what I said about Mr. Winslow being a scientist," said Alan. "This stuff is spooky."  
  
"He's an alchemist," Dolly informed him.  
  
"Oh, that explains a lot."  
  
They reached a far corner of the library and found a wooden desk with cluttered papers on top. Above it, posted on the wall, was a large pedigree chart.  
  
"Oh, look!" exclaimed Prunella. "It must be Mr. Winslow's genealogy."  
  
The three kids stood in front of the chart and started to read from the bottom. Angus Winslow's name was there, along with several other Winslows, male and female, and a few other last names.  
  
While Prunella scanned the chart upwards, she found some very familiar names-- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Proctor. Winslow himself was a descendant of Matthew Proctor, as Prunella was of Luke. "He's related to me," she mused.  
  
Then she saw something that made her gasp in horror.  
  
Unlike her own pedigree chart, Winslow's had a name in the Husband slot next to Charity Proctor.  
  
The name was Alvin Matheson.  
  
TBC 


	25. Dolly's Outrage

"Omigosh!" cried Prunella. "Alvin Matheson? My great-great-great-whatever grandmother Charity married that...that witch-killer?"  
  
Dolly quickly directed her eyes to the top of the pedigree chart, where Prunella was looking. She was stunned to see the name Alvin Matheson in Winslow's genealogy. She remembered the reverend quite well...he had only murdered almost all of the women in her family...  
  
It all made sense...  
  
Unnoticed by Alan and Prunella, Dolly turned and marched toward the secret library entrance, her face filled with grim indignation.  
  
Mr. Winslow had just ended a call to one of his associates, and was dialing another number on his cell phone, when the furious-looking Dolly walked up to the table where they had worked together the previous day...and grabbed the Cleansing Stone.  
  
Winslow dropped the phone in shock. The witch girl was pointing the magical green stone at him, and the outrage in her visage suggested she was about to use it.  
  
"Stop!" exclaimed Winslow, now terrified. "Put it down! It hasn't been tested!"  
  
"I know what you're up to now," snarled Dolly as Alan and Prunella approached her from the side. "You're trying to finish what your ancestors started. You took from me by stealth and guile what the women of my family sacrificed their lives to protect. You want to eliminate all evil from the world. So did the Reverend Alvin Matheson. He was one of your people, wasn't he? He wanted the Wicasta to help him create a stone like the one I'm holding in my hand, and when they refused, he butchered them!"  
  
Winslow stepped back slowly, gaping and wordless.  
  
"Tell me the truth," Dolly demanded, waving the Cleansing Stone threateningly. "Tell me, or I'll use the stone to force it out of you!" Alan and Prunella looked at each other, unsure of what action to take.  
  
"Put down the stone," Winslow pleaded, "and I'll tell you everything."  
  
Dolly didn't budge, but only clenched her teeth more tightly. The green stone in her hand blocked Winslow's chest from her view.  
  
The rabbit man tried to calm himself, then began to speak. "Yes, Reverend Alvin Matheson was an alchemist, like myself. Many of us had other careers that served as cover for our true calling. Yes, he wanted the Wicasta of old to aid him in the creation of a Cleansing Stone. And yes, when they resisted, he had them executed...including your mother, Dolly. I'm terribly sorry."  
  
Dolly's anger gradually turned into sorrow, and tears formed in her eyes.  
  
"There's no excuse for what my ancestor did," Winslow continued. "When he had executed every woman in your family except for Charity, he thought of a plan that would serve his purposes as well as prevent the gift of the Wicasta from being lost to the world. He offered to not press witchcraft charges against Charity if she agreed to be his wife. He figured that the gift would be passed to his daughters, and he would be able to influence them to do his bidding. But Charity gave birth to four sons, and then she died."  
  
By this time Dolly was sobbing, and tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she still aimed the stone rigidly at Winslow.  
  
"I'm nothing like him," he said calmly. "I would never kill."  
  
"I don't believe you!" shrieked Dolly.  
  
The stone in her hand began to pulsate and glow...  
  
"No!" Prunella lunged at Dolly's outstretched arm, knocking the Cleansing Stone aside just as glowing tendrils snaked out of it and wrapped around Winslow's body.  
  
"Get away from me!" Dolly growled, and the two girls were shortly locked in a struggle over the stone. As Dolly turned around to shelter the object from Prunella with her own body, Alan stepped in and attempted to break up the conflict.  
  
"Stop it, you two!" he barked, and the girls moved away from each other, looking embarrassed. Nearby, Winslow gazed down at his hands and torso, relieved to find that he was still in one piece. Alan walked over to him and asked, "Are you all right?"  
  
"I feel a little strange," said Winslow. "She got some of my evil, but not all of it. I guess you'll see a kinder, gentler Angus Winslow from now on."  
  
Then Alan and Winslow approached Dolly, who glowered at them but kept the stone hidden in her armpit. "Dolly, give Mr. Winslow the stone," Alan ordered.  
  
"Please, Dolly," Winslow urged, holding out his hand.  
  
Prunella drew closer to her. "It belongs to Mr. Winslow," she pleaded. "Please give it back to him."  
  
Dolly gave everyone present a final glower before she slowly, reluctantly placed the Cleansing Stone in Winslow's palm. The man closed his fingers around it, then went over to a wall safe and began to twist the dial. Within moments, he had locked the stone securely inside.  
  
The young witch appeared she might cry again, so Alan tried to comfort her with an arm around her shoulder--but Dolly lurched away, growling, "Don't touch me!"  
  
It wasn't the Dolly he knew. She seemed more like a wild animal...  
  
----  
  
Maria and Nadine Harris elected to remain in Salem with Winslow for a few days, so Mrs. Prufrock, Dolly, Prunella, and Alan drove back to Elwood City without them. Throughout the six-hour journey Dolly sat sulking in the back seat, rarely speaking to anyone except when she needed a rest area break.  
  
Once Mrs. Prufrock had left Alan and Dolly at the Powers home, she and Prunella returned to their own house. Rubella, who was practicing her golf swing in the living room, greeted them. "Mr. Winslow called," she told Prunella. "He says it's urgent."  
  
Hurrying to the phone, Prunella dialed Winslow's cell phone number. Within seconds she heard his voice. "Hello?"  
  
"Hi, it's Prunella."  
  
"Thank goodness," said the harried-sounding Winslow. "We have a serious problem on our hands. The Cleansing Stone has disappeared!"  
  
TBC 


	26. Mostly Cloudy

The doorbell rang at the Powers home, and Alan opened the door to be met by an anxious-looking Prunella. "Is she here?" the girl asked warily. 

"You mean Dolly?" Alan glanced over his shoulder. "Yeah, she's in her room, changing."

"I think you'd better come with me," said Prunella. "I'm afraid she may have some magical way of listening in on us."

Intrigued, Alan followed Prunella out of the house and down the sidewalk.

"Mr. Winslow just called me," Prunella related. "He's lost the Cleansing Stone. I think Dolly might have taken it."

"Don't be ridiculous," Alan responded. "We all saw him put the stone in the safe. Maybe he took it out and mislaid it somewhere."

"No, Alan," Prunella insisted. "When he opened the safe, it was gone."

"Hmm..." Alan's thoughts deepened, but he could think of no explanation.

"Remember the trick Dolly did with Muffy's hair ribbon?" Prunella went on. "She made it look like she gave it back to Muffy, but she still had it. What if she used the same trick on Mr. Winslow?"

"Why would Dolly want to steal the Cleansing Stone?" asked Alan, his voice rising to an indignant pitch.

Prunella shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe she wants to suck the evil out of all the kids who were mean to her."

"I don't believe Dolly would do such a thing," said Alan, shaking his head. "I mean, she can do all those tricks, and she could easily steal stuff if she wanted to, but she hasn't."

"I think we should ask her," said Prunella.

"I think we should drop it," Alan replied.

So they did...

----

...until the next day.

"As you know, today is show-and-tell day," Mr. Wald announced to his pupils. "Binky, you're the first in alphabetical order, so..."

Dolly quickly raised her hand. "Pardon me, sir, but I would like to go first today."

The teacher looked at her quizzically as the other kids murmured and complained under their breaths. "All right, Dolly," said Mr. Wald, "but you'd better have something really impressive to show us."

"I most assuredly do," said Dolly, rising from her desk. As she stepped to the front of the room, the kids wondered what sort of freakish exhibit they would be treated to. A dead newt on a stick? A voodoo doll of someone in the class?

"I went to Salem over the weekend," Dolly recounted, "and I brought back a lovely stone, which I'll now show you." Then she pulled a square-shaped green stone from her dress pocket and waved it to and fro so that all could see.

"It's beautiful, Dolly," said Francine, the only child in the class who had much good to say about Dolly and her trinkets.

The other students were bored and uninterested...until the stone started to give off a glowing green light. What appeared to be curved beams of energy emanated from it, and surrounded everyone in the room, except for Dolly herself. For a second or two everyone, including the teacher, marveled at the unusual sight, and then the energy tendrils faded away.

Dolly was no longer looking at an unsympathetic, distrustful audience. Instead the other students wore oblivious smiles, and seemed happy to be present. Delighted with what had transpired, Dolly replaced the stone in her pocket.

Van was the first to speak up. "Gee, I'm sorry, Dolly," he said contritely. "I was afraid of you because I thought you were evil. I don't think you're evil anymore. I'd like to be your friend."

Then Beat, who had always stood at the forefront of the anti-Dolly forces, gave an apology as well. "I'm so sorry for all the cruel things I said and did."

"So am I," Muffy chimed in.

"Me too," added Binky and George.

"Dolly, I think you're the coolest," said Arthur.

"Can you ever forgive us?" asked Fern.

Dolly glanced around at the humbled schoolchildren, and a wicked grin spread across her face. "No," she said sadistically. "I'll never forgive you." As she returned to her desk, the kids noticed that the whites of her eyes had taken on a red tinge.

The class period went on, and Mr. Wald seemed more placid and cheerful than usual as he presented his lesson. As the hour neared an end, he announced to his charges, "I resolve from now on to give you twice as much homework, so you'll learn twice as fast."

"Yaaaaaay!" cheered all of the kids except for Dolly.

Alan and Prunella knew immediately that something was amiss when they saw the kids in Mr. Wald's class milling about in the center court, vapid smiles on their faces. A few of them appeared to be speaking words of praise to Dolly, who only smirked condescendingly and walked away from them. She almost knocked Prunella and Alan over as she stepped between them, grumbling, "Out of my way!"

"Well, that was rude," Prunella remarked as she watched the rat girl march single-mindedly toward an exit.

"Did you see her eyes?" Alan commented. "They were..."

Muffy cut him off, approaching him and Prunella with a friendly grin. "Hi, Alan, how are you today?"

"Uh, I'm fine," said Alan, surprised that Muffy hadn't immediately started to tell him how SHE was doing. "Say, Muffy, can I borrow fifty dollars?"

"Sure," the rich girl replied, digging her sizable wallet from her blouse pocket and pulling out a bill.

"Thanks a lot," said Alan, plucking the bill from Muffy's fingers. "I probably won't be able to pay it back. By the way, your dress is ugly."

"See you later, Alan," said Muffy, walking past him.

Prunella couldn't believe what she had just witnessed. Seeing Binky on his way over, she stopped him. "Hey, Binky, did Dolly have a green rock with her today?"

"Yeah, it was cool," the boy answered. "She made these, like, weird waves come out of it. They filled the whole room."

Alan strolled up to Binky, raising his fists and posturing threateningly. "Hey, doofus!" he bellowed. "You want a piece of me?"

"How generous of you to offer," said Binky, his warm smile not fading in the slightest.

"Cut it out, Alan," said Prunella, sticking an arm between the two boys. "Binky, tell me more about the weird waves."

Binky did his best to describe them in precise detail. "They were, like, weird and wavy." He turned his head. "Like those waves over there."

Startled, Alan and Prunella followed Binky's eyes and saw a web of glowing, undulating lines spread across one of the walls of the center court. Rattles, who was leaning on a column and looking for kids to intimidate, was caught by the strange energy net and began to smile and wave cheerfully at the students who passed by him.

Inexpressible terror filled Alan's mind. "RUN!" he shrieked, and he and Prunella dashed for the nearest exit that hadn't already been enveloped by the energy web. Curious, Binky jogged after them, wondering what had frightened them.

The web grew and spread, soon filling the entire center court and causing all children who made contact with it to appear idyllically happy. Prunella and Alan, fleeing with all their strength, glanced back and saw that the web had encased the entire school building, and was starting to pick up speed. When Binky realized he couldn't catch up with the pair, he stopped and allowed the energy lines to harmlessly encompass him.

"That way!" cried Alan, pointing. The web seemed to be moving in a circular fashion, and the only hope he and Prunella had of escape was to move closer to its center of origin.

They stopped briefly in a thicket of trees. From their vantage point they could see Dolly in an abandoned corner of the soccer field, the Cleansing Stone in her hand, and lightning-like tendrils pouring out of it.

"If she sees us, we're history," Prunella observed. "Come on!"

They began to run again, in a wide circle around Dolly's position. Alan looked over his shoulder and beheld, to his horror, that the stone's waves were arcing into the sky and reaching almost to the horizon. "She's zapping the whole city!" he exclaimed.

They ran frantically, covering what must have been three square city blocks, while Dolly turned slowly and the stone in her hand emitted the cleansing waves into one sector of the city after another. Her eyes, by this time, had become phosphorescent red.

After several minutes, they looked behind and noticed that the web had vanished. They stopped running, started to breathe heavily, and noticed that the weather was beginning to change...

A powerful gust of wind emerged from nowhere, almost bowling them over. Dark, thick rainclouds formed over their heads, as if summoned from distant regions of the previously clear sky, but no rain fell. They felt as if they were standing next to an active tornado.

Once they were confident that the web would not reappear, they struggled against the roaring wind in the direction of the soccer field. There, they witnessed an unbelievable sight.

The stormclouds seemed to be swirling about, their eye positioned immediately above Dolly. The wind-whipped rat girl, still unaware that Alan and Prunella were observing her, clutched the Cleansing Stone in her hand...and cackled insanely.

"Whatever this is, it's not good," Alan stated the obvious. He and Prunella continued toward Dolly, fearing at any moment to be seen by her.

"I just thought of something, Alan," said Prunella. "Remember when you told me about the Law of Conversation, or whatever it was?"

"The Law of Conservation," Alan corrected her. "Matter can't be created or destroyed, only moved or rearranged."

"Yeah, whatever," said Prunella. "What if evil is the same way? I think that's what happened to Dolly. She sucked the evil out of all those people, but it didn't just go away...it went into _her!_"

Alan grimaced, terrified by the implications of what Prunella had hypothesized.

And then another surprise hit them. Dolly raised her arms into the air, and was all at once surrounded by blazing light, causing Alan and Prunella to cover their eyes. When the light faded, Dolly had changed clothes--she no longer wore the dress that Mrs. Powers had bought for her, but a black robe and pointed hat. In one hand she held the Cleansing Stone, and the other gripped a crooked, beaten-up broomstick. She continued to laugh maniacally.

"Oh, this is just too much," Alan groaned. "We have to get that stone away from her, now!"

"Leave that to me," said Prunella. "I know a sleight-of-hand trick."

The two children tiptoed up to Dolly from behind, Prunella taking the lead. The cackling witch girl remained unaware of their presence. When Prunella had come within a foot or two, she tapped Dolly on the shoulder. "Huh?" the girl grunted, turning around.

Then Prunella drew back her fist and slugged Dolly squarely in the nose.

The blow knocked Dolly on her back, and the stone and broomstick dropped from her hands. Without a second to lose, Prunella reached down and grabbed the stone, bounded over to the edge of the soccer field, and hurled the object against the asphalt with all the strength she could muster. To her elation, it shattered into pieces.

Alan hurried to her side. "You call_that_ sleight-of-hand?"

"Whatever works," said Prunella, stamping on the fragments of the Cleansing Stone with the heel of her shoe.

Then the wind became almost deafening. Whirling, they saw that Dolly had risen to her feet and was glaring at them with blood-red eyes. "You struck me," she growled, and her voice was miraculously audible above the howling gale.

"We only want to help you, Dolly!" shouted Prunella, but the wind blasted her voice backwards.

"YOU STRUCK ME!" shrieked the furious Dolly.

Then she lifted her arms, and something resembling black lightning bolts shot from her fingers.

Alan suddenly felt as if a black hole had exploded only inches from where he stood. The force threw him to the asphalt, and the rough surface scratched his arm. Dolly was drawing closer to him, her arms still raised; it appeared she was not moving her feet.

Pushing himself up with his arm, he looked over to his side...and gasped. Where Prunella had stood only a second before, there was nothing but a scorched spot on the pavement...

TBC


	27. Yes, Master

"Where's Prunella?" bellowed Alan, scrambling to his feet. "What did you do to her?" The wind began to die down, making it easier for him to hear Dolly's response.  
  
"I don't know," replied Dolly with a sarcastic grin. "I've never done that before."  
  
"Bring her back!" demanded Alan, clenching his fists.  
  
"I will," said Dolly in a normal tone of voice, "as soon as Mr. Winslow creates a new Cleansing Stone for me."  
  
"Right," snarled Alan. "So you can do to the rest of the world what you just did to Elwood City."  
  
"Precisely." Dolly's voice grew louder, and her body slowly became bathed in spectacular light. "With the might of the Cleansing Stone, I shall draw all of the world's evil into myself. Then my power shall reach unto the very stars! All shall love me and despair!"  
  
"I'll stop you!" Alan barked. "I'll warn Mr. Winslow!"  
  
"Come closer, Alan," said Dolly, the fiery light around her beginning to fade. "I have a new word to teach you."  
  
Disarmed by Dolly's unexpected request, Alan cocked his ears and listened carefully.  
  
"(Bleep)," said Dolly.  
  
Alan suddenly felt his mind clouding over. He couldn't think. He couldn't resist...  
  
"Yes, master," he droned, sticking out his arms. "Your every wish is my command."  
  
"As it should be." Dolly stepped closer to the mesmerized Alan and put a warm hand on his shoulder. "You will now return to your class, and forget about what happened here."  
  
"Yes, master," Alan repeated, and started to walk rigidly in the direction of the school, his arms still out in front.  
  
"And put your arms down," Dolly called after him. "You look like a dork."  
  
As the obedient Alan lowered his arms and continued his mindless march toward the school entrance, Dolly picked up her broom, held it aloft, and started to rise into the air, cackling wildly.  
  
During phys-ed class, the kids balked at forming teams, but chose instead to simply take turns kicking the soccer ball into the goal net. Molly and Rattles wandered about the school lot, apologizing to the kids they had bullied, and offering them candy to atone for their misdeeds. The kids in Alan's class displayed no malice toward him or their annoying new teacher, Mrs. Krantz, although they expressed a little concern about Prunella's absence. Alan himself trudged robotically from one class to the next, answering the teacher's questions from time to time with an emotionless tone of voice. Most unusually of all, the kids thanked the cook after enjoying their cafeteria lunches.  
  
Throughout the city, pedestrians greeted each other warmly, even when they were total strangers to each other. Traffic flowed smoothly, as every driver became compulsively courteous. Police officers lounged about in donut shops, as there were no crimes to be stopped. People who had been bitter enemies fell into each others' arms, weeping and begging forgiveness. For all intents and purposes, Elwood City had become a perfect Shangri-La, its peace only disturbed occasionally by an emergency call for someone who had fallen ill or died.  
  
Prunella and Dolly were nowhere to be seen.  
  
School let out a few minutes early that day, and the smiling Lakewood kids rushed to their homes, anxious to get started on their increased portions of homework. Alan, still bereft of his free will, shuffled through the door of his house and was greeted by his cheerful mother. "How was school today?"  
  
"Fine," mumbled Alan on his way to the living room. "Just fine."  
  
"Are you okay, dear?" Mrs. Powers asked him.  
  
"Fine," Alan repeated. Seating himself on the couch, he picked up the remote control and began to stare thoughtlessly at the TV screen.  
  
"The Bionic Bunny Show has been cancelled today," came the announcer's voice. "In its place, we will air a children's program that contains no gratuitous violence or destructive behavior."  
  
"Mary Moo Cow, Mary Moo Cow..."  
  
Even in his trancelike state, Alan knew that he didn't enjoy watching New Moo Revue, despite the fact that two of his friends were in the cast. He clicked the remote.  
  
"I'm reporting live from Salem, Massachusetts, where the famous Winslow Witch Museum was destroyed earlier today by a massive fireball."  
  
The shocking news rattled Alan's mind, freeing him from Dolly's hypnotic spell. "Oh, no!" he exclaimed, jumping down from the couch and hurrying to the phone. Dialing Mr. Winslow's cell phone number, he waited breathlessly and desperately for a sound that would prove to him that the curator/alchemist was still alive.  
  
It didn't come. "You have reached the voice mail of Angus Winslow. Please leave a message after the tone."  
  
----  
  
"I've been trying to contact him ever since," Alan told Buster. "Either Dolly got to him, or else he's hiding out somewhere and isn't answering his cell phone. Wherever he is, I'll bet Nadine and her mom are with him."  
  
"So Dolly could be just about anywhere." Buster glanced around suspiciously. "She could be listening to us right now."  
  
"Possibly," said Alan, whose voice had grown weary from relating the long tale. "I'm not sure how powerful she is now. All I know is, if she gets another Cleansing Stone, she'll become invincible."  
  
"Yeah," Buster mused. "She'll make us all her slaves. You're right, that is worse than aliens."  
  
"I don't know what to do," said Alan, shaking his head. "If there's a way to make Dolly good again, only Mr. Winslow knows what it is, and I'm not sure if I can even trust him. What if he really wants the power for himself?"  
  
"But you said only women can have the power," Buster pointed out.  
  
"Yes," Alan replied, "but maybe if a man gets enough evil inside of him, that would give him powers."  
  
The mystified Buster took in a deep breath and let it out.  
  
Alan looked down at his hands. "I'm afraid, Buster. What if they have to kill her to stop her?"  
  
TBC 


	28. Rampage

As the Lakewood gang returned from helping to mulch trees at the park, they saw a young man and woman holding hands and standing in front of the Tibble house. They were dressed in tie-dyed shirts and ragged jeans, and both had long hair; the man sported a shaggy beard. A "For Sale" sign was sticking out of the house's front yard.  
  
"Those look like nice people," said Muffy. "Let's go talk to them." She headed in their direction, followed by Arthur, Francine, Fern, Alan, Buster, Binky, George, Beat, and Mavis.  
  
"Peace," the young man and woman saluted them, making victory signs with their hands.  
  
"We've got plenty of that here," Muffy told them. "It's gotten so you have to leave town if you want to find two people who don't get along. If you want to buy a car, on the other hand, you won't find better deals than the ones at Crosswire Motors. My dad has slashed prices on all his cars. He's practically giving them away."  
  
"We're, like, thinking of moving here," said the hippie man.  
  
"We think Elwood City is, like, a nexus of cosmic energy or, like, something like that," the hippie woman added.  
  
"Do you, like, know anything about this, like, house?" asked the hippie man, gesturing toward the Tibble residence.  
  
"I found a ghost in the cellar once," Fern recounted.  
  
"It's, like, haunted," mused the hippie woman. "Groovy."  
  
"We'd love to have you in our city," said Arthur.  
  
"Tell all your friends about it," George added.  
  
Alan and Buster looked at each other and rolled their eyes, certain that the city's unnatural condition was about to be compounded by an influx of hippie types.  
  
"Whoa, check it out." The hippie man pointed toward the rear of the crowd. "It's, like, Halloween already."  
  
All the kids turned, wondering what the man was referring to. Alan's heart nearly shot out of his mouth when he saw...  
  
...the red-eyed Dolly Proctor standing calmly behind them, still wearing her black witch costume and clutching her broomstick.  
  
"Dolly's back!" exclaimed Binky.  
  
"We missed you," said Francine. "Where have you been?"  
  
"What's wrong with your eyes?" inquired Mavis.  
  
Dolly didn't say a word, but simply snapped her fingers, and a burst of white light surrounded the two hippies. When it faded, the kids were astonished to see a pair of bullfrogs squatting on the sidewalk. Alan and Buster wailed in terror, fearing they might be transformed next...  
  
The two bullfrogs eyed each other. "She, like, turned us into frogs," observed the female frog.  
  
"Trippy, man," responded the male frog.  
  
"I didn't know she could do that," said Binky nervously.  
  
"She's come to punish us for being mean to her," Beat imagined. "We deserve it."  
  
While Buster stared wide-eyed at the croaking hippie frogs, Alan turned to face Dolly and mustered up courage and anger. "You won't get away with this!" he bellowed.  
  
"Oh, please, Alan," said Dolly condescendingly. "That line's older than I am."  
  
"What do you want?" Alan asked her, hoping he might somehow forestall his doom by keeping Dolly busy with questions.  
  
"I want Winslow." Dolly scowled menacingly, and an aura of darkness started to form around her. "And you had better hope he's somewhere nearby, because I'm going to pour out my wrath upon the city until he appears."  
  
That was all Alan needed to hear. "Everybody run!" he cried out. "Take cover!"  
  
As the kids fled in all directions, the ground seemed to shake beneath their feet. Those who glanced over their shoulders were treated to the fearsome sight of Dolly floating into the air, mounted on her broomstick, a swirling cloud of dark vapor surrounding her. She pointed down at the street and fired a black bolt from her finger, which ripped open a crater and sent chunks of asphalt and concrete raining down on the neighboring houses.  
  
Alan could only think of saving himself, and he seriously doubted whether he could even do that. Then he recalled a month-old memory...and something that might give him a fighting chance. Changing course, he ran at full speed toward Prunella's house.  
  
Ascending higher and higher on her broom, Dolly scanned the region and saw that some of the children had hidden themselves behind bushes or walls of houses, while others were racing along the sidewalk. Among the latter was Muffy...  
  
...who stopped pumping her legs and let out a frightened squeal when Dolly swooped down ahead of her. "I never liked you," snarled the young witch. "You and your fancy house and your vaults full of money."  
  
"Please don't hurt me," pleaded Muffy, wringing one of her braids in her quivering hands.  
  
"I'm not going to hurt you," said Dolly, who then waved her hand at Muffy. The girl froze solid, and her clothes, skin, and hair turned the color of gold. "There, now, that didn't hurt a bit." Dolly tapped her heels together and rose into the air, leaving the golden statue of Muffy alone.  
  
Cowering behind a shrub, Binky was alarmed to discover that his legs were becoming thick and heavy, and his arms were involuntarily rising...and getting longer. Within moments there was a new apple tree in the yard, with a knot in its trunk that remarkably resembled Binky's face.  
  
Dolly chose as her next target Beat, who was scurrying toward the entrance to her apartment building. Suddenly bowled over by a mystical blast, she leaped to her feet and patted her torso with her hands, relieved to find nothing amiss...or so she thought. A strange girl had appeared in front of her--a confused rabbit girl who was wearing a gray sweatsuit exactly like her own, and whose hair was arranged in an identical fashion. From the rabbit girl's point of view, she was facing a twin of herself, one who was fully aardvark...  
  
"Two Beats, or not two Beats," gloated Dolly, hovering on her broomstick above the befuddled rabbit girl and aardvark girl. "That is the question."  
  
"Wh-who are you?" stammered Rabbit Beat as she ran her fingers along the bridge of her new nose.  
  
"I'm Beat," replied Aardvark Beat, who was curiously exploring her altered ears.  
  
"I'm Beat too," said Rabbit Beat in wonder. "Will you be my friend?"  
  
Arthur had reached the front yard of his house, and was affectionately greeted by his trusty pooch, Pal. Then he felt a powerful shock course through his body. When he recovered, he found that his head was much closer to the ground than before, his glasses had disappeared, and Pal had started to bark fiercely at him. "Calm down, boy! It's me!" he urged gently, but to no avail. It occurred to him that Pal only reacted in such an angry manner when he was confronted by a...cat...  
  
As Arthur scampered away on all fours, Buster followed Fern into her house, where they hoped to find refuge. When they had reached the living room, Buster had a disturbing realization. "You forgot to lock the door!" he chided Fern.  
  
"Why should I?" asked Fern incredulously. "There's no more crime."  
  
The door flew open, and into the house soared Dolly astride her broom. She made a figure-eight in the kitchen, flicked a magical bolt at Fern and Buster, and exited the same way she had come.  
  
Once they became aware again, the first thing Buster and Fern noticed was that their heads were abnormally close together. Looking downward, they gasped in terror to find that they were sharing the same body. Turning toward a nearby mirror, they beheld the reflection of a two-headed monstrosity--a creature that was Buster on the left side and Fern on the right. Fern's blouse and skirt flowed seamlessly into Buster's sweater and pants down the middle.  
  
"Cool!" exclaimed Buster's head with glee. "I'm half girl!"  
  
"I don't even want to think about how this works," Fern's head muttered.  
  
Concealing herself in the shade of a wall, Mavis watched Dolly whip past and thought she had been spared. Then she heard a hissing noise...several hissing noises...  
  
Dozens of snakes of every color were crawling through the grass toward her feet. Panicking and screaming, Mavis bolted away from the house, through the fence, and into the street. To her dismay, hordes of slithering creatures were emerging from every lot and taking up residence on the asphalt. No matter which way she fled, they matched her movements. "Mommy!" she shrieked, running frantically toward her house and squashing three or four serpents with every step.  
  
As George cautiously hopped over the snakes, Dolly cut him off from the side, still levitating on her broom. "I have a solution to your bully problem," she offered, then snapped her fingers and floated away.  
  
At first George noticed nothing strange about himself. There was, however, something wrong with the surrounding houses. They were getting smaller...  
  
George glanced down at his feet, and saw that the snakes infesting the sidewalk were dwindling to the size of worms. In addition, he was starting to experience difficulty breathing and supporting his own weight. His knees buckled, and he collapsed onto his stomach and face with an earth-rattling thud.  
  
Francine, considering herself lucky to have reached her apartment alive, took a peek through the window at the bizarre scene below. George filled the entire street, measuring half a block from antlers to toes, unable to move a muscle. On either side of him crowds of snakes slithered past, directed by some unseen hand to persecute Mavis. Next to the solid-gold Muffy statue sat an anxious-looking tabby cat, glancing about and occasionally licking its paw. The rabbit and aardvark Beats were gazing in admiration at George's gigantic face, while the two-headed Fern-Buster creature lurched clumsily past the apple tree that had once been Binky.  
  
"Remember, Buster," said Fern, "you control my half of the body, and I control yours."  
  
"I get the side with the dress," Buster gloated.  
  
"Can't...move...can't...breathe..." rasped the helpless, oversized George.  
  
Above it all, Dolly and her broomstick spun around in lazy circles. Francine followed the cackling witch girl with her eyes, wondering why she herself hadn't yet fallen victim to a dire enchantment. Was it because she had been friendly with Dolly before?  
  
The next thing she noticed was Alan bursting out of Prunella's house and charging into the street, with an unidentifiable object partially hidden in one of his rear pockets. The boy shook his fist up at Dolly and shouted defiantly, "Come and get me, too!"  
  
Unable to resist, Dolly slowly descended toward Alan's position. She raised an arm, then a finger...  
  
"Dolly!"  
  
She knew the voice, even before she swiveled on her broom and saw Angus Winslow climbing out of a white sedan at the side of the street. On the passenger side, Maria Harris was opening her door to exit the vehicle.  
  
Ignoring Alan's challenge, Dolly lowered herself until she reached Winslow's position. "You got here sooner than I expected," she remarked.  
  
"We've been following you ever since you changed course for Elwood City," Winslow replied. "I have a device that can track large concentrations of evil. That's how we were able to clear everything out of the lab before you destroyed it."  
  
Dolly floated closer to Winslow and stared directly into his eyes. "You know what I want," she said firmly.  
  
"Yes, I do." Winslow reached into the pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out a marbled-green, square-shaped stone. "And here it is."  
  
TBC 


	29. Witch Switch

"Don't give it to her!" cried Alan, running over to Mr. Winslow. "She'll take over the whole world!" 

"I know what I'm doing, Alan," said the rabbit man calmly. As he held up the stone, Dolly sailed nearer on her broomstick and plucked it from his fingers. With Alan watching in despair, she cradled it in one hand while stroking it with the fingers of the other.

"Oh, yes," she whispered gushingly. "My precious."

Suddenly a flash of green light exploded from the stone, enveloping Dolly and casting weird shadows on her face. When it had disappeared as quickly as it had come, Alan saw that the whites of Dolly's eyes were white again, not red.

Her expression became increasingly contrite as she looked up and down the street at the children who had been afflicted by her dark magic. "Oh, sweet heavens," she said plaintively. "What have I done?"

"Reverse the spells, quickly!" Winslow ordered, but Dolly had already resolved to do so. Holding the green stone in one hand, she raised the other and fired streaks of white lightning that filled the air throughout the entire block. George shrunk down to his original size, the two Beats were thrust into each other and merged into one, Fern and Buster were split into separate bodies, Arthur was transformed from a cat into an aardvark with glasses, the golden statue of Muffy returned to life, the apple tree reverted to Binky's form, and the snakes slithered from the street and into the grass.

Last of all, Prunella reappeared in a burst of energy, and landed on her back next to Alan.

Dolly heaved a sigh of relief. "Now give up your magical powers," Winslow instructed her.

The witch girl, still hovering on her broom and holding the green stone, shrugged and looked confused. "I...don't know how."

As Winslow racked his brain for an answer, Dolly's eyes started to turn red again. Her face twisted into a wicked sneer. She began to crush the stone with her fingers. "Very clever," she said triumphantly, "trying to trick me with a larger version of the stone in your ring. But the effect only lasts a few seconds for someone as evil as myself."

Alan's heart plummeted when he saw the expression of fear and hopelessness on Winslow's face. If the alchemist didn't know what to do, then they were all equally doomed...

Prunella rose groggily to her feet. "How much did I miss?" she asked Alan quietly.

Dolly butted her broom against Winslow, who backed up nervously until he hit against the side of the sedan. Maria rounded the back of the vehicle and came to the side of her paramour.

Winslow was at the end of his rope, but he would never let Dolly know that. He might yet have a chance...if he could stall for time. "I destroyed all of my ingredients," he claimed, "and I told my associates to do the same. It will take three or four months to gather everything I need to create a new Cleansing Stone. But if you lend your Wicasta abilities, I think I can get it done in..."

"I have better things to do than look over your shoulder!" Dolly snapped.

Then she put her finger on her chin thoughtfully. "Hmm..." Alan and Prunella fixed their eyes on her, wondering what mischief she was planning.

Dolly backed up on her broom, giving Winslow more freedom of movement. "Yes, I think I will lend my Wicasta abilities," she said slowly and sinisterly. "Stand aside, Mrs. Harris." Maria didn't budge.

Dolly cast her spell anyway. Waves of blackness shot from her fingers, completely enveloping Winslow's body like a cocoon. Several seconds passed, and the form inside the darkness seemed to change shape. Then Dolly put down her hands, and the shadows dissolved from around Winslow...

...but Winslow was no longer there.

In his place stood a blond rabbit woman, a foot shorter than Winslow, with shoulder-length hair, clad in a gray business dress, white stockings, and black pumps. The woman stood rigidly and stared directly ahead, displaying no sign of emotion or self-will.

Maria, Alan, and Prunella were stupefied by what they had witnessed. The other kids, freed from their curses, started to gather around the grim scene.

"Who is she?" Maria asked Dolly. "Where's Angus?" Dolly only smirked.

Then Maria examined the rabbit woman's face more closely, and realized that her facial features closely resembled Winslow's. She gasped in shock and anger. "No! You didn't!"

"I had to," Dolly explained. "No man can possess the gift of the Wicasta."

Alan stammered with disbelief. "Y-you mean...y-you turned him..."

"Th-that's exactly what I m-mean," Dolly mocked him. "Now that Winslow is a Wicasta like myself, he--or rather, she--can create a new Cleansing Stone in a fraction of the time."

"Oh, Angus, no!" wept Maria, stroking the unresponsive rabbit woman's face.

"Why isn't she moving?" asked Prunella.

"Because I haven't commanded her to," Dolly replied. Turning to the rabbit woman, she inquired, "Who is your master, Miss Winslow?"

"You are," the woman intoned robotically.

Maria turned to Dolly, her expression one of anguish and fury. "You monster!"

"No," replied Dolly. "_You_ monster." She raised a finger and pointed it at Mrs. Harris...

...when Prunella suddenly realized what Alan was keeping in his rear pocket. Stealthily slipping her hand behind his back, she grabbed the object by the handle and pulled it out. Alan, guessing that she knew what she was doing, didn't try to stop her.

She sprang in front of Alan, sheltering him from Dolly. "Omigosh, Alan!" she said loudly and frantically. "What if she switches the rest of us, too? I don't want to be an icky boy!"

Upon hearing this outburst, Dolly pointed her finger away from Maria and toward Prunella. "You've just given me a fine idea," she said, grinning maliciously.

A bolt of darkness flew from her hand.

Prunella pulled from behind her back the object she had taken from Alan--the handheld mirror that Dolly had enchanted earlier with a deflecting spell.

The magical bolt bounced off the surface of Prunella's mirror, shot back to where it came from, and struck Dolly between the eyes. Strands of blackness enveloped her as she fell from her broom and plunged to the ground.

An instant later, the broom fell also. The rabbit woman who had been Angus Winslow groaned and collapsed to the ground in front of the sedan, and Maria crouched down in hopes of assisting her.

Alan, Prunella, and the other kids watched unblinkingly as the shroud surrounding Dolly dissipated. Where once had been a rat girl in a witch outfit, there was now a rat boy with short brown hair, wearing a plain sweater and blue trousers. The boy jumped to his feet, and his eyes bulged when he looked down at his new form. "NOOOO!" he screamed. "How dare you do this to me! I'll destroy you all!" He stuck out his hands and waved them at the surrounding children, but nothing happened.

"That was brilliant, Prunella," Alan congratulated his classmate. "Now that Dolly's a boy, she has no powers."

"Just wait!" growled Boy Dolly, waving his arms. "I'll have my powers working again any second now!"

In the meantime, the rabbit woman, whose back Maria had leaned against the car, came out of her faint. "Wh-what happened?" she mumbled. "What's wrong with my voice? Why do I sound like a...oh, no..."

"It's all right, Angus," said Maria, still a bit tearful. "The danger is past. We've won."

"Puny worms! Insects!" Boy Dolly threatened. "I'll crush you like nothing!"

The other kids paid no attention to his bluster, as they were engrossed by the drama of the hapless Winslow, who was examining her new body in speechless, gaping horror. Yet even more surprising than the awkward and embarrassing sensations she was experiencing, was the fact that everywhere she looked, things had taken on a new quality. As if she had developed a sixth sense...

"Help me to my feet, Maria," she requested. Mrs. Harris gave her a hand up, and she took a second to stabilize herself on the unfamiliar footwear.

"I feel so strange," muttered Winslow, taking a few halting steps. "Everything looks different. I think it's the Wicasta gift." Approaching Prunella, she took the mirror from the girl's hand and grimaced with shock when she beheld her new reflection.

"Will you be all right?" asked Maria with concern.

"I'll be more than all right," replied Winslow, the fear in her voice turning into confidence. "This is the best thing that's ever happened to the field of alchemy. I...I just wish I didn't feel so weird." She lowered the mirror and handed it to Prunella.

"You'll get used to it," Maria assured her.

Muffy turned to George and quietly remarked, "Some are born female, some achieve femaleness, and some have femaleness thrust upon them."

Hearing Boy Dolly's furious threats, Winslow stepped over to him and instinctively waved her right hand, which no longer bore the jade ring. The boy calmed down, then began to sob bitterly. "I'm a boy," he wailed. "This is horrible!"

"Yes, Dolly," said Winslow comfortingly, "we're both looking at life through different eyes now. But it's not so bad, you'll see."

Boy Dolly continued to weep. "I'm so sorry for doing this to you," he told Winslow. "But you're all that's left of the Wicasta now. You have to find a way to change us back."

"I'll do my best," said Winslow, although she couldn't help but feel that it was hopeless. Seeing with her Wicasta vision that the concentrated evil in Boy Dolly's soul was once again overwhelming the good, she waved her hand at him again...and then it occurred to her that she was doing it without the ring. How was that possible?

And if this was possible, then what else was she capable of?

"I hate boy clothes," Boy Dolly groused. "I want to wear a beautiful dress and tie pretty ribbons in my hair."

Without thinking about what she was doing, Winslow waved one hand at Boy Dolly, and the other at Muffy. A strange thrill passed through her body.

Muffy suddenly shook her head and made a horrified expression. "Omigosh!" she exclaimed. "My dad's lowered the prices on his cars so much, he'll go bankrupt!"

Then Winslow waved her hand at Binky. The bulldog boy glanced about and said, "This is getting boring. I think I'll go watch some wrestling."

A hand wave at Arthur followed. "I can't believe I watched New Moo Revue with my sister and enjoyed it," he remarked.

Beat was next. "Now you know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a curse," she snapped at Boy Dolly.

Again and again, Winslow drew from Boy Dolly's built-up evil and transferred it into the soul of a neighborhood dweller, restoring the balance that had been lost when Dolly exercised the power of the Cleansing Stone. "I can't believe what's happening, Maria," she commented. "With my knowledge of alchemy and my new witch powers, I can control good and evil without needing any kind of stone. Power like this must be what the Wicasta of old were afraid of."

Maria fell silent, fearing that any remark would be trite in the face of Winslow's overwhelming epiphany.

After a few more hand waves, Winslow lowered her arms. "Get in the car, Maria," she ordered. "We're going on a tour of the city, and you get to drive. Dolly, Alan, you're coming too."

While Maria slipped into the driver's seat and Alan and Boy Dolly climbed into the back, Winslow struggled to seat herself properly. She had to push up with her hands and adjust her dress several times, and positioning the shoulder strap comfortably had become a nontrivial task. She wondered which would be more difficult to adapt to--being a woman, or dressing like one.

Maria drove the sedan down the street, careful to avoid the gaping crater that Dolly had made. Winslow waved her hand at each house they passed, and Boy Dolly felt small amounts of evil going out of him. Alan passed the time trying to persuade him that it was fun and cool to be a boy, but he remained grim-faced and unconvinced.

"Your sand castle's a little taller than mine," Tommy told Timmy as the twins were frolicking in the sandbox behind the kindergarten building.

"No, I think they're about the same size," Timmy replied.

The sedan whipped past them, and they felt a strange influence.

"My sand castle's taller than your sand castle," boasted Tommy.

"No, it isn't," Timmy retorted, and a moment later the two were rolling in the sand, fighting.

"And every year they have a Pinewood Derby," Alan related to Boy Dolly. "We get to make cars out of wood and race them."

"Boring," Boy Dolly grumbled.

Meanwhile, Winslow was discovering that she no longer needed to wave her hand, but could repair the good/evil imbalance merely by thinking. As Maria drove her through one neighborhood after another, she started to ask some serious questions. "Maria, what's it like to have a baby?"

Maria thought for a moment. "You mean, besides the torn uterus and the episiotomy and all that?"

"Yes," said Winslow, feeling uneasy.

"It's the sweetest thing in the world," said Maria.

"Good." Winslow sighed. "I was hoping Dolly would grow up and get married and have daughters and pass on the gift, but now...well, now it's my job."

"You make it sound like a bad thing," Maria quipped, and they drove on.

TBC


	30. The Age of Augusta

When Alan, Boy Dolly, Maria, and Winslow the rabbit woman arrived at the Prufrock house, they found that most of Prunella's friends had gathered to welcome the long-missing girl home. "The city should be more or less back to normal now," Winslow announced to all present.  
  
"Except for you and Dolly," said Francine.  
  
"I wonder what my dad would say if he saw you like that," mused Arthur.  
  
"I guess we'll find out," Winslow replied.  
  
Muffy approached Winslow and looked over her gray dress. "Dolly may know a lot about magic," she remarked, "but she doesn't know the first thing about fashion. We need to get you out of that tacky dress into something more presentable."  
  
"Absolutely," said Winslow, straightening her hair. "How about it, Maria? Want to go clothes shopping with us?"  
  
Maria grinned. "I'd love to, Angus."  
  
"Call me Augusta," Winslow instructed her.  
  
"Well, come on, ladies," said Muffy, hastening Maria and Winslow along. "Let's get to the mall before all the stores raise their prices."  
  
As the trio left the house, the remaining kids turned their attention to the sad-faced Boy Dolly, who stood in a corner with his back turned.  
  
Fern was the first to attempt to console him. "Gosh," she said earnestly, "I never know what to say when a tragedy like this happens."  
  
"What do you mean, tragedy?" retorted Buster, who stepped up to Boy Dolly's other side. "This isn't a tragedy, it's a...a...hey, Alan, what's the opposite of tragedy?"  
  
"Comedy," Alan replied glibly.  
  
"Yeah, it's a comedy," Buster told Boy Dolly.  
  
"I don't think it's funny at all," the rat boy murmured.  
  
Their efforts proving fruitless, Fern and Buster returned to their seats.  
  
"He'll get used to it sooner or later," said Beat. "He doesn't really have a choice."  
  
"We can't call him Dolly anymore," Binky observed.  
  
"Yeah, we need to give him a boy's name," said Arthur.  
  
"Fred!" suggested George.  
  
"Johnny!" Prunella threw out.  
  
"No, no," Alan interrupted. "Let's think of a name that sounds like Dolly."  
  
"Polly?" Buster proposed.  
  
"Molly?" Mavis contributed.  
  
"Those are girl's names," said Alan.  
  
Then Boy Dolly briefly turned his head and muttered, "Dudley."  
  
The other kids thought about his suggestion for a moment.  
  
"Dudley it is," Alan proclaimed. "Welcome to the gang, Dudley."  
  
Dudley didn't respond, but continued to stare glumly at the corner.  
  
----  
  
Augusta Winslow, as she now called herself, stood in front of a hotel desk, surrounded by bags containing boxed articles of clothing she had purchased at the local mall. "May I see your driver's license, ma'am?" requested the clerk, a pimply young cat man.  
  
"You don't need to see my driver's license," said Winslow, waving her hand at the young man's face.  
  
"Uh, I don't need to see your driver's license," muttered the clerk.  
  
Once finished at the desk, Winslow ported her bags to the elevator, relieved at not having to explain why a man's picture was on her license.  
  
In her hotel room, Winslow gazed at her reflection in the full-length mirror for about half an hour, trying to accustom herself to her new appearance. Then she changed into a blue evening gown Maria and Muffy had helped her pick out, lay down on the comfortable queen bed, and thought about the many adjustments she would have to make.  
  
How would she convince her associates that she had once been Angus Winslow? Given the powers she had exhibited, would she even need the help of her associates anymore? Should she remain in Salem or move to Elwood City, where the dating pool favored women? Should she admit to others that she had been a man once, or should she keep the fact hidden?  
  
As she pondered such weighty questions, a knock came at the door. She rose from the bed to answer it, but made sure to look through the peephole--as a woman, she might find it more difficult to defend against intruders. She could easily drain the evil from an attacker, but then she would have to place it in someone else, and she didn't want to do that, especially if someone else was herself. For if she should ever be swayed to the path of evil, no force on Earth would be able to stand against her...  
  
No one was at the door. Curious, Winslow opened it a crack and stuck her blond rabbit head out. It seemed for an instant that something was pushing on the door, opening it wider, but she saw no one. Closing the door and fastening the lock, she turned around...  
  
...and cried out in surprise. Standing before her was an orange-haired cat girl who appeared to be about twelve years old. Attached to her back was a large green pack that seemed to be filled to capacity. "Who are you?" asked Winslow suspiciously. "How did you get in here?"  
  
"Sit down, Augusta," the girl ordered, removing her pack. "You may find my story a little hard to swallow."  
  
Seating herself on the edge of the bed, Winslow wondered how this girl had known the new first name she had just chosen for herself.  
  
"My name is April Murphy," the cat girl began, "but that wasn't always my name. Two years from now, a girl named Sue Ellen Armstrong will be pronounced dead from complications of the AIDS virus. That girl is me. The death will be fake. Two weeks later, my parents"--the girl's face grew somber--"my parents will be murdered by enemy agents."  
  
"What do you mean, will be?" Winslow wanted to know.  
  
"None of this has happened yet," April explained. "But it happened to me, because I'm from the future."  
  
Winslow glared incredulously at her.  
  
"Your newfound talents will bring about huge strides in the field of alchemy," April continued, pulling some objects from her pack. "Your inventions will include this." She held out a round, sapphire-hued stone. "It's a stone that can make its bearer invisible. And this." She showed Winslow a box-shaped device containing several dials. "It's a time reverser. With this, you can go as far into the past as you want. Only catch is, you can't use it to go into the future. It's a one-way ride."  
  
"Interesting," said Winslow, brushing a hair from her face.  
  
"When my parents were murdered, I was heartbroken," April went on, emotion discernible in her voice. "I would do anything to bring them back. I knew you were working on a time travel device because of the intelligence the CIA gathered about you. You didn't want to test it on yourself because you were pregnant with a baby girl, so I volunteered, and here I am."  
  
Winslow found herself becoming increasingly intrigued by the girl's tale.  
  
April replaced the two objects in the pack, and pulled out a sizable black box. When she opened it, Winslow saw an odd-shaped crystal about the size of a loaf of bread inside.  
  
"This is a crystal battery developed by scientists at Los Cactos," April told her. "You were studying it for its potential as an evil-storage device. The first thing I did when I came to the past was sneak into Los Cactos with the invisibility stone, and steal the crystal."  
  
The term "evil-storage" caused Winslow to light up like a bulb.  
  
"The Law of Conservation of Good and Evil is an inescapeable reality," April went on. "If you want to drain all the evil from the world, you have to put it somewhere, and the Los Cactos crystal may be the answer."  
  
By this time Winslow was smiling greedily.  
  
"I want the same thing you want, Augusta," said April, dropping the crystal case into her pack. "A perfect world. No war, no crime, no prejudice. And we've got two years to make it happen, or my parents will be murdered all over again." She put out her right hand. "What do you say, Augusta? Partners?"  
  
It appeared to Winslow that she had just been handed the realization of her wildest ambitions, and then some, on a silver platter. Suddenly being female wasn't so frightening anymore.  
  
She reached out and shook April's hand. "Partners."  
  
Lowering her hand, she began to laugh.  
  
THE END 


End file.
